AI pioneer Yann Le Cun reportedly quits Meta over the future of intelligence • FRANCE 24 English

AI pioneer Yann Le Cun reportedly quits Meta over the future of intelligence • FRANCE 24 English

I promise you, Catherine, we’re not just covering this because he’s French. Uh the headlines that we’ve seen over the last couple of days around his potential departure speak volumes to how important he is to AI. He’s one of three people considered the godfathers of AI, receiving the Turing Prize along with Joshua Benjio and Jeffrey Hinton. born near Paris and educated at what’s now the Sorbon. He’s as much a engineer and a physicist as he is a computer scientist ending up at Bell Labs in New Jersey which is a legendary lab. There he um he pioneered work on recognizing handwriting which was used by banks across the world. Went via New York University eventually in 2013 to Meta which was at the time Facebook. uh Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg picked him to lead their AI efforts and he did so uh until the next sort of for the next five years. In 2018, he moved to a kind of advisory, but still very important role as their chief AI scientist, leading a lot of the pioneering cuttingedge work at Meta. And we can’t understate it. the work he was doing at Meta was so important to AI today, the kind of AI that we’re all using because um he kind of pushed this opensource, open research approach which allowed lots of other AI uh companies to piggyback on the work of Meta and really led to the acceleration of AI that we’re seeing today. Now, Peter, why is he leaving now? So we should say that this is according to media reports but it’s undoubtedly because of Lan’s change of heart when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence. He really thinks that the current all-in approach on large language models and that’s those all consuming data hungry beasts that drive the like of Chachi PT today. He thinks that approach is a bit of a dead end. He’d rather be seeing everyone focusing their efforts on something called world models. Now to explain rather than feeding uh the your AI spoon feeding it lots of data or text um to learn from. The idea with world models is that you create an artificial virtual world a bit like in a video game for instance with its own uh details and its own physics and you put an AI into that world and it starts to interact with the world around it and learn that way. So it’s almost like a baby learning than it is teaching a child uh how to read. That that’s that’s the difference there. So that’s his bug bear. He wants to see the world going there. But you know, we can’t not look at the politics of this as well. Um he was obviously quite uncomfortable uh increasingly uncomfortable at Meta, which was taking a sort of bit of a right-wing swing under Mark Zuckerberg given the rise of Trumpism. Um, when I interviewed Lant at the Paris AI Summit back in February, I asked him about Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments that more masculine energy was needed in AI. Take a listen. No, no, not at all. That doesn’t come into it. No, absolutely not. No. Uh, I mean, the best way to make progress is you have, you know, a small team of talented people. you give them a long leash uh the means to succeed and and you you you let them invent the thing that needs to be invented without necessarily having a lot of time pressure you know to produce uh products I mean you need to do that as well u but you don’t get breakthroughs by directing large teams you you get that by you know doing research letting people invent completely new things hints there that he was desperate to have a smaller, more agile team than the one he found at Meta perhaps. Catherine, now how has the world been reacting to this news? Well, yes, of course, there have been lots of tributes from people who respect his uh his pioneering innovations and his uh championing of open source. There have also been a certain amount of gloating who see people as kind of a constant thorn in the side to the large language model status quo that we now have. and actually more gloating from people who do agree with him but who point out that he himself used to uh support uh large large language models and what does this mean for the future of AI right so Lar certainly intends on keeping his voice heard we know this just from his spat with Anthropic and other AI company in recent days but whether his departure means that uh his view is kind of sidelined or whether his new startup can make waves and make a difference obviously we don’t know yet But Meta’s approach might change even more so than it already does. And because Meta is such a key lynchpin, as I described for all these other AI companies that could have reverberations. Um, we know that Meta has spent billions of dollars hiring expensive talents uh to lead their new AI drive. The likes of Scale AI’s Alexander Wang. Scale AI is known for their armies of people around the world labeling data. This is exactly the kind of work that Lar criticizes and says it’s not necessary if we take a world model approach. Um, as we know it all depends on the whim of one man and that’s Mark Zuckerberg and my counterpart on the French channel Gon has written all about Mark Zuckerberg’s change uh of TAC in the last few years in his book Pony. I couldn’t help but plug that one for us. Give it a read. It’s a it’s a remarkable account of Meta’s transformation.

Reports suggest Yann Le Cun, one of the “godfathers of AI”, is leaving Meta after over a decade pioneering artificial intelligence research at Mark Zuckerberg’s tech titan. Le Cun says he no longer believes that scaling up large language models of the kind that power ChatGPT will lead to superhuman intelligence. Instead, he is betting on “world models”, AI that learns more like a baby than a bot.
#Meta #AI #Zuckerberg

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