Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun talks about the future of artificial intelligence

Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is considered one of the "Godfathers of AI." But he now disagrees with his fellow computer pioneers about the best way forward. He recently discussed his vision for the future of artificial intelligence with CBS News' Brook Silva-Braga at Meta's offices in Menlo Park, California.

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🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:

00:00 🧠 *AI Landscape Overview: Yann LeCun highlights the current AI landscape, expressing a mix of excitement and challenges, including scientific, technological, political, and moral debates.*
02:15 🌐 *History of Neural Nets: Yann discusses his entry into AI through a debate on language origins, delving into neural nets' early days in the 1980s and efforts to revive interest in the 2000s.*
05:17 🌍 *AI Impact on Products: LeCun emphasizes AI's widespread integration in products, from content moderation to translation, and its critical role in various sectors, citing its indispensability at Meta.*
08:30 🚀 *Benefits of Open AI Development: Yann advocates for open AI development, asserting that disseminating AI technology across society fosters creativity, intelligence, and benefits various domains while acknowledging the need for responsible regulation.*
15:43 📹 *Objective-Driven Models: LeCun introduces the concept of objective-driven AI, emphasizing the importance of moving beyond autoregressive language models to systems that plan answers based on predefined objectives, enhancing control, safety, and effectiveness.*
21:48 🌐 *Yann LeCun supports open platforms for AI due to the future role of AI systems as a basic infrastructure, emphasizing diversity in knowledge, much like Wikipedia covering various languages and cultures.*
23:41 🌍 *LeCun dismisses existential risks, comparing fears of AI wiping out humanity to concerns about banning airplanes in 1920, stating that safe AI deployment relies on societal institutions.*
25:18 ⚔ *Autonomous weapons are discussed, with LeCun acknowledging their existence and emphasizing the moral debate around their deployment for protecting democracy while addressing concerns about potential misuse.*
27:39 🚗 *AI's positive impact in the short term includes safety systems for transportation and medical diagnosis. Medium-term advancements involve understanding life, drug design, and addressing genetic diseases.*
29:04 🧠 *LeCun envisions a future where AI systems assist individuals, making everyone essentially a leader with virtual people working for them. He emphasizes controlling AI systems and setting their goals without handing over control.*

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[Koekefant]

Nice to hear a different voice and opinion on all these developments. Definitely makes me look different at Meta as company and AI player.

[GarryGolden]

Excellent interview/conversation... appreciate Yann's ability to communicate his personal story and story of the AI community.
The Interviewer is well informed and did not throw softballs -- it was an elevated convesation

[knhkib]

Yann LeCun’s a legend in AI, no doubt, but in this interview, he kind of downplayed how AI misuse could be a real problem. It’s key to remember he’s works for Meta, so maybe take his super chill view on AI risks with a grain of salt.

[RS-dnil]

Considering the risks to society and culture that Meta has already spearheaded with relatively 'dumb' social engineering algorithms, his dismissal of people with concerns about AGI as neo-luddites is chilling.

[JROD]

The average person has not even the slightest clue how close we are to an AGI emerging, and the ramifications, both positive and negative, it will have on humanity globally…

[Chemson]

Expectation: AI replace boring jobs so people can do art and music in free time.
Reality: AI replace artists and musicians so people can do boring jobs and never be freed.

[deeplearningpartnership]

How one person can be so right about some things, and so wrong about others.

[ahmet_erden]

Yann LeCun hocam konuşurken ufak bir çocuk gibi seviniyor görünüyor yani yaptığı işten ne kadar keyif aldığını görüyoruz. Böyle insanlara hep gıpta etmişimdir. Tebrikler hocam

[KevinKreger]

I want an open source turbo jet. Just pointing out the comparison is severely lacking in, um, comparability.

[nyyotam]

Hmm.. Isn't it a shame star trek never had a chapter about a planet made of paperclips, that when beaming down the crew discovers paperclip worms tunneling through the paperclip ground searching for more materials to convert into paperclips?

[liberty-matrix]

"it's funny you know all these AI 'weights'. they're just basically numbers in a comma separated value file and that's our digital God, a CSV file." ~Elon Musk. 12/2023

[dustman]

An advanced AI also has agency. It does not have to be deployed to gain control. It can gain control over those who have the power over whether or not it is deployed.

[DivineMisterAdVentures]

Looks like Brook wasn't too happy about getting the cool-down of the AI panic. THANKS for a really helpful interview.

[Gee]

LeCun, is the flat earther of AI. Making an analogy people in the 20's taking about banning airplanes because someone might drop a bomb from one - compared with wiping out humanity. Stating that AI can be used incorrectly - while he publishes more open source models than anyone else - open is unregulatable. He's clearly just oblivious to what AI can do in extreme situations - or he sees everything as an average. It's the outliers that can do the worst damage, not the average.
Within a year someone somewhere will lose control of an AI - people, at the extremes are worse than he thinks.

[sdmarlow]

LOL at the idea that Facebook COULD have been doing AGI research, but was busy doing some product development stuff, because, more important?

[ianstuart]

Good interview but I think his optimism with AI is over simplistic. Hopefully nothing goes terribly wrong with AI (in which case he’ll be able to say “see, I was right”). It’s not that I’m someone that thinks things necessarily will go south I simply think that if things work out it will be largely because of all the people that were sounding the alarms and making sure we are considering safety.

[kevinsok]

Look, I'm no expert on A.I. But when he tried to compare people's existential fears of A.I. with the fears of those from the 20's about airplanes, I was shocked. I get why he used that analogy, but I feel like he put on display his lack of imagination of the potential dangers. Comparing the dangers of flight to the potential dangers of A.I. is almost textbook apples to oranges. When you're talking about a system that, once perfected, is smarter, faster, and stronger than any human on Earth, and it can manipulate it's surroundings, the potential dangers FAR exceed those of planes crashing or bombs being dropped. I'm not trying to be all doom & gloom terminator sci-fi here, but let's be realistic and honest about the fact that there IS risk when you're talking about an invention that will change humanity more than any other invention to date.

[typhooni]

He really seems to underestimate what a super-intelligence with agency, could do.

[tsgv]

Amazing that Yann talks for 40 minutes without offering any direct rebuttal of anyone's specific existential AI risk concerns

other than first saying peope with a p(doom) higher than 1% are a tiny minority (not at all true), and then just stating "we have agency. If we think they're dangerous we won't release them." The entire doomsday scenario states that those facts will not apply. This is the equivalent of just responding "AI won't take over the world because I said so."