Meta’s AI chief: LLMs will never reach human-level intelligence

There’s no escaping the hype around artificial general intelligence. Barely a day passes without a new headline about the concept, which envisions computer systems outperforming humans at various cognitive tasks. In the last month alone, a trio of tech luminaries have added fresh proclamations. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested AGI would arrive within five years. Ben “father of AGI” Goertzel forecasted a mere three. Elon Musk typically made the boldest prediction for the tipping point: the end of 2025. Still, not everyone is so bullish. One notable sceptic is Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist and a winner of the prestigious Turing Award. Often referred to as one of three “godfathers of AI,” LeCun goes as far as to argue that “there is no such thing as AGI” because “human intelligence is nowhere near general.” The Frenchman prefers to chart a path towards “human-level AI.” At an event on Tuesday in London — Meta’s flagship engineering hub outside the US — LeCun said even that remains a distant destination. He pointed to a quartet of cognitive challenges: reasoning, planning, persistent memory, and understanding the physical world. “Those are four essential characteristics of human intelligence — also animal intelligence, for that matter — that current AI systems can’t do,” he said. Without these capabilities, AI applications remain limited and error-prone. Autonomous vehicles still aren’t safe for public roads. Domestic robots struggle with basic household chores. Our smart assistants can only complete basic tasks. These intellectual shortcomings are particularly prominent in large language models (LLMs). In LeCun’s view, they’re severely restricted by their reliance on one form of human knowledge: text. “We’re easily fooled into thinking they are intelligent because of their fluency with language, but really, their understanding of reality is very superficial,” he said. “They’re useful, there’s no question about that. But on the path towards human-level intelligence, an LLM is basically an off-ramp, a distraction, a dead end.”

Full report : Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist says that artificial generative intelligence can never achieve reasoning, planning, persistent memory, and understanding the physical world.