The Godfather Of AI Doesn’t Think The Technology Is An “Existential Risk To Humanity”, But Others AI Luminaries Disagree
Plenty of people are up in arms about the rapid growth and deployment of AI. There have already been strikes in Hollywood, and creatives everywhere are more than a little concerned about what it could mean for the future of their crafts.
Yann LeCun, the so-called “godfather of AI,” thinks everyone needs to stop being so dramatic, though.
In fact, he thinks all of the doomsday panic is “preposterous.”
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LeCun told the Financial Times that “intelligence has nothing to do with a desire to dominate,” so there’s no reason to fear AI rising up against us at some point, either.
“If it were true that the smartest humans wanted to dominate others, then Albert Einstein and other scientists would have been both rich and powerful, and they were neither”
This stance makes LeCun an outlier among industry leaders, though, including two other “godfathers of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengia.
Both have previously expressed concern and regret over the potential destruction their creation might wreak.
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LeCun doesn’t care, continuing to insist that those people are overestimating the capabilities of current AI models.
“AI models just do not understand how the world works. They’re not capable of planning. They’re not capable of real reasoning. We do not have completely autonomous, self-driving cars that can train themselves to drive in about 20 hours of practice, something a 17-year-old can do.”
There is a chance, obviously, that LeCun being a large part of Meta’s AI development is coloring his opinion about “counterproductive” regulation in the industry.
He says big tech leaders who favor such regulation are “incredibly arrogant” and don’t believe anyone else should be able to develop the tech.
LeCun does admit that it will not be long before AI is more intelligent than humans.
“There’s no question that we’ll have machines assisting us that are smarter than us. And the question is: is that scary or is that exciting? I think it’s exciting because those machines will be doing our bidding. They will be under our control.”
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Me? I think this sounds a lot like the guy with way too much hubris at the beginning of a science fiction movie.
One where the machines wipe the floor with human beings for at least half of the film.
I guess we’ll see…
