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LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

400 points · 756 comments · Anon84

  1. edot · · focus · HN ↗
    Absolutely based. Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown. Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real.

    There are lots of real worries (government use to suppress the people with minimal manpower or popular support, brainrot and fake news, unemployment due to the belief that LLMs can replace people, education collapse, etc.) we should instead be looking at. This whole rogue AI shtick is tiresome.

    1. reasonableklout · · focus · HN ↗
      LeCun has been consistently wrong about LLMs though, claiming that they were a dead end and that they'd never be able to do spatial reasoning, which was disproved a year later with GPT-4 [1]. He is also opposed by his fellow Turing laureates Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who both signed the CAIS statement on AI extinction risk [2].

      [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OpenAI&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1d5ns1z&#x2F;yann_lecun_confidently_predicted_that_llms_will&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;OpenAI&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1d5ns1z&#x2F;yann_lecun_...

      [2]: safe.ai&#x2F;statement-on-ai-risk

      1. oxag3n · · focus · HN ↗
        [1] is not a valid proof LeCun was wrong, LLMs still can&#x27;t do spacial reasoning when it can&#x27;t be derived from the training data. He didn&#x27;t argue that GPT 5000 won&#x27;t be able to describe something with words.
        1. simianwords · · focus · HN ↗
          we have benchmarks proving it can do spatial reasoning.
          1. qayxc · · focus · HN ↗
            ...poorly? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ENWVpqtOdRI?t=867" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ENWVpqtOdRI?t=867
            1. fnord77 · · focus · HN ↗
              [delayed]
              1. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
                Careful, you&#x27;ll have them accelerating their goal posts up to the speed of light if you keep questioning them. That much kinetic energy is dangerous.

                Of course this is the same reason LeCun holds very little sway with his words for me, they seem to be terrible predictors of the future.

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