AI pioneer Yann LeCun doesn’t believe artificial intelligence is really about to become intelligent.
LeCun, professor at New York University, principal investigator of Meta and winner of the prestigious AM Turning Award – has been open about his skepticism before, e.g. tweeting that before we worry about controlling superintelligent AI, “we need to have the beginnings of a design hint for a system smarter than a house cat.”
He explained his opinions in an interview with the Wall Street Journalwhere he responded to a question about whether AI becomes intelligent enough to pose a threat to humanity by saying, “You’ll have to forgive my French, but that’s complete nonsense.”
LeCun argued that current large language models lack some key cat-level capabilities, such as persistent memory, reasoning, planning, and understanding the physical world. In his view, LLMs simply demonstrate that “you can manipulate language and not be intelligent” and will never lead to true artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Not that I’m a complete AGI skeptic. However, he said new approaches will be needed. For example, he noted that his fundamental AI research team at Meta works to digest real-world video.