Meta’s Yann LeCun says concerns about an existential threat from artificial intelligence are ‘complete nonsense’

Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun doesn’t imagine that artificial intelligence is on the verge of becoming intelligent.

LeCun – Professor at New York University, senior researcher at Meta, and winner of a prestigious competition AM Turning Award — for instance, he has spoken openly about his skepticism before tweeting that before we worry about controlling superintelligent AI, “we need to have a beginning design for a system that’s smarter than a house cat.”

He developed his opinion in interview for the Wall Street Journal.where he answered a matter about whether artificial intelligence has turn out to be intelligent enough to pose a threat to humanity by saying, “You’ll have to excuse my French, but it’s complete bullshit.”

LeCun argued that today’s large language models lack some key cat-level abilities, equivalent to persistent memory, reasoning, planning, and understanding the physical world. In his opinion, LLMs only show that “you can manipulate language and not be smart” and won’t ever result in true artificial general intelligence (AGI).

It’s not that he’s a whole AGI skeptic. But he said latest approaches can be needed. For example, he identified that his AI fundamental research team at Meta is working on analyzing real-world video.