Thread

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

403 points · 762 comments · Anon84

edot · 1791067681 · 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 · 1791077807 · 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://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1d5ns1z/yann_lecun_confidently_predicted_that_llms_will/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1d5ns1z/yann_lecun_...
  [2]: safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk
  1. oxag3n · 1791083471 · focus · HN ↗
    [1] is not a valid proof LeCun was wrong, LLMs still can't do spacial reasoning when it can't be derived from the training data. He didn't argue that GPT 5000 won't be able to describe something with words.
    brainwad · 1791115925 · focus · HN ↗
    This really doesn'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.
    mym1990 · 1791127183 · focus · HN ↗
    Or it’s just taking common examples from training and applying those copied heuristics to your problem? Doesn’t mean it’s actually reasoning about the space and how to solve the problem. It’s the equivalent of a student writing an answer they saw somewhere else without understanding “why”.
    brainwad · 1791130563 · focus · HN ↗
    Looking at the reasoning traces it sure seems like it's reasoning. It internally debates which of the possibly matching parts of the input are the one described by me in the prompt and picks the right one based on sound reasoning.
    fwip · 1791142411 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    brainwad · 1791144391 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not just text that appears at first blush to resemble reasoning, it's actual sound reasoning. And it can chain it for hours at a time without breaking down.

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