Meta’s Yann LeCun says worries about the existential threat of AI are ‘total BS’

AI pioneer Yann LeCun doesn’t think artificial intelligence is actually close to being intelligent.

LeCun — a professor at New York University, a senior researcher at Meta, and winner of the prestigious AM Turning Award — has been open about his skepticism before, for example writing on Twitter that before we worry about controlling super-intelligent AI, ” we need a starting point for the design of a system that is smarter than a house cat.”

He elaborated on his views in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, where he responded to a question about AI being smart enough to pose a threat to humanity by saying, “You’ll have to excuse my French, but that’s complete BS. “

LeCun argued that today’s dominant language models lack important cat-level skills, such as continuous memory, reasoning, planning, and understanding the visual world. In his view, LLMs only show that “you can control language and not be smart” and will never lead to true general intelligence (AGI).

It’s not that he’s a complete opponent of AGI. However, he said new methods will still be needed. For example, he demonstrated work on real-world video processing by his Fundamental AI Research group at Meta.