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Meta’s AI Chief believes hyperbolic warnings about artificial intelligence’s (A.I.) powers as being ‘complete B.S.’
The rise of AI in numerous industries worldwide has led many to be concerned about its future, including its impact on jobs and human connections.
In contrast, the college professor and Meta AI Chief, Yann LeCun, replies with “You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.” when asked whether we should be afraid that AI will soon grow so powerful they pose a hazard to humans.
The 64-year-old French-American computer scientist has published works featuring research into AI, machine learning, robotics, and more. He’s the Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research, having joined in December of 2013.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, published on Friday (October 11), he disagrees with the notion that AI is a danger to humanity. He thinks that the AI models of today are useful, but are far from rivaling the intelligence of our pets, let alone humans.
Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun says it’ll take years for AI to ‘get as smart as cats’
When an OpenAI researcher announced they were leaving in May, LeCun replied on X writing: “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat.”
It seems to me that before "urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us" we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat.
Such a sense of urgency reveals an extremely distorted view of reality.
No wonder the more… https://t.co/fbavtOA6YE— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) May 18, 2024
He later says in his post “It will take years for them [intelligent systems] to get as smart as cats, and more years to get as smart as humans, let alone smarter (don’t confuse the superhuman knowledge accumulation and retrieval abilities of current LLMs with actual intelligence).
“It will take years for them to be deployed and fine-tuned for efficiency and safety as they are made smarter and smarter.”
While he believes there’s still a long way to go, he does think AI is a worthy goal: “In the future, when people will talk to their AI system, to their smart glasses or whatever else, we need those AI systems to basically have human-level characteristics, and really have common sense, and really behave like a human assistant.”
Featured Image: Via Ecole Polytechnique – J.Barande on Flickr
