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

399 points · 752 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. brainwad · · focus · HN ↗
          This really doesn&#x27;t match my experience. I can ask an LLM to modify engineering plans using vague natural language prompts and it will find the right place in the plan from the description and then make appropriate modifications, which necessarily requires doing spacial reasoning.
          1. jxcole · · focus · HN ↗
            I think the point here is that LeCun was arguing that training on pure text would not grant spatial understanding. I believe most models are trained on spatial data as well, so you are both right.
            1. brainwad · · focus · HN ↗
              Is that what he meant? He works on models with an explicitly spatial internal representation, whereas I was using a standard LLM that edited the provided plan by using a bajillion python calls to inspect small regions of the image at a time.
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