Meta’s Yann LeCun says worries about A.I.’s existential threat are ‘complete B.S.’

AI pioneer Yann LeCun doesn’t think artificial intelligence is actually on the verge of becoming intelligent.

LeCun — a professor at New York University, senior researcher at Meta, and winner of the prestigious A.M. Turning Award — has been open about his skepticism before, for example tweeting that before we worry about controlling super-intelligent AI, “we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat.”

He elaborated on his opinions in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, where he replied to a question about A.I. becoming smart enough to pose a threat to humanity by saying, “You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.”

LeCun argued that today’s large language models lack some key cat-level capabilities, like persistent memory, reasoning, planning, and an understanding the physical world. In his view, LLMs merely demonstrate that “you can manipulate language and not be smart” and will never lead to true artificial general intelligence (AGI).

It’s not that he’s a complete AGI skeptic. However, he said new approaches will be needed. For example, he pointed to work around digesting real world video by his Fundamental AI Research team at Meta.