Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, received another accolade to add to his long list of awards on Sunday, when he was recognized with a TIME100 Impact Award for his contributions to the world of artificial intelligence. Ahead of the award ceremony in Dubai, LeCun sat down with TIME to discuss the barriers to achieving “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), the merits of Meta’s open-source approach, and what he sees as the “preposterous” claim that AI could pose an existential risk to the human race. Many people in the tech world today believe that training large language models (LLMs) on more computing power and more data will lead to artificial general intelligence. Do you agree? It’s astonishing how [LLMs] work, if you train them at scale, but it’s very limited. We see today that those systems hallucinate, they don’t really understand the real world. They require enormous amounts of data to reach a level of intelligence that is not that great in the end. And they can’t really reason. They can’t plan anything other than things they’ve been trained on. So they’re not a road towards what people call “AGI.” I hate the term. They’re useful, there’s no question. But they are not a path towards human-level intelligence. You mentioned you hate the acronym “AGI.” It’s a term that Mark Zuckerberg used in January, when he announced that Meta is pivoting towards building artificial general intelligence as one of its central goals as an organization. There’s a lot of misunderstanding there. So the mission of FAIR [Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team] is human-level intelligence. This ship has sailed, it’s a battle I’ve lost, but I don’t like to call it AGI because human intelligence is not general at all. There are characteristics that intelligent beings have that no AI systems have today, like understanding the physical world; planning a sequence of actions to reach a goal; reasoning in ways that can take you a long time. Humans, animals, have a special piece of our brain that we use as working memory. LLMs don’t have that.
Full interview : Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun answers questions on future of Artificial General Intelligence, Open-Source AI, and AI Risks.
