Meta's AI chief Yann LeCun calls AI apocalypse fears "complete B.S."

A hot potato: Artificial Intelligence is going to reach a point where it will become smarter than humans, and that could threaten our very existence – or so many people warn. However, Yann LeCun, Meta senior researcher and one of the so-called Godfathers of AI, thinks such claims are "complete B.S."

LeCun is one of those in the industry who believes the doomsday talk about AI is overblown. He called warnings that the technology was a threat to humanity "ridiculous" last year, repeating his words to the Wall Street Journal last week.

"You're going to have to pardon my French, but that's complete B.S.," he told the publication, when asked if AI will become smart enough to pose a threat to humanity.

Unlike those in the industry who believe Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will be the next step in the generative AI revolution, LeCun says today's LLMs will not lead to a system matching or surpassing human capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks.

LeCun: doesn't think cats are particualrly smart

The New York University professor said that LLMs such as ChatGPT and Grok lack persistent memory, reasoning, planning, and an understanding of the physical world. He added that LLMs prove that "you can manipulate language and not be smart," and they will never lead to true AGI.

"We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart – but that's not true."

LeCun told the Journal that LLMs aren't as smart as a house cat, but they are very good at predicting the next word in the text they generate, which is what leads people into thinking they're actually "smart" or even intelligent.

LeCun isn't totally against the idea of an AGI; he just thinks that it won't arrive via more advanced LLMs.

Several big names in the industry believe we are on a fast path to AGI. Nvidia's Jensen Huang thinks it will be here in the next five years. OpenAI boss Sam Altman thinks it will be the "reasonably close-ish future" before we see AGI. But then Altman also claims a superintelligence – an AI that is vastly smarter than humans – is coming in "a few thousand days."

LeCun, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio earned the Godfathers of AI nickname in 2019 after winning the Turing Prize. Hinton left his job at Google in 2023, warning that as companies exploit more powerful AI systems, they're becoming increasingly dangerous.