I’m truly, deeply baffled by Yann LeCun’s bizarre pronouncements about AI safety.
He talks about AI safety and alignment issues as if he’s simply too stupid to understand the ‘AI Doomer’ concerns (including those shared by most EAs.) But he’s clearly not stupid in terms of general intelligence—his machine learning work has been cited over 300,000 times, with an h-index of 143 (which is very, very high).
So, is this just motivated reasoning by someone with very deep professional and financial incentives to promote AI capabilities research? His position as a Vice President, and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, suggests that he might have too much ‘skin in the AI game’ to be very critical. And yet, many other leading AI researchers and AI company CEOs have expressed serious concerns about AI extinction risk—despite their skin in the game.
Anybody have any insights into why LeCun is so dismissive about AI X risk?
Isn’t it the case that lots (in raw numbers, not %) of smart people believe irrational things (e.g. religion, health, climate, politics) all the time? When you consider the size of the AI field, there was going to be at least one LeCun right?
Yeah, fair point. But most such irrational beliefs tend to be somewhat outside smart people’s fields of personal expertise. And smart people tend to update if they’re exposed to a lot of skeptical feedback—which LeCun has been, on Twitter. Yet he’s dug in his heels, and become even more anti-safety in recent months.
Maybe in the grand scheme his personal views don’t matter much. But to a psychologist like me, his behavior is both baffling and chilling.
I’m truly, deeply baffled by Yann LeCun’s bizarre pronouncements about AI safety.
He talks about AI safety and alignment issues as if he’s simply too stupid to understand the ‘AI Doomer’ concerns (including those shared by most EAs.) But he’s clearly not stupid in terms of general intelligence—his machine learning work has been cited over 300,000 times, with an h-index of 143 (which is very, very high).
So, is this just motivated reasoning by someone with very deep professional and financial incentives to promote AI capabilities research? His position as a Vice President, and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, suggests that he might have too much ‘skin in the AI game’ to be very critical. And yet, many other leading AI researchers and AI company CEOs have expressed serious concerns about AI extinction risk—despite their skin in the game.
Anybody have any insights into why LeCun is so dismissive about AI X risk?
Isn’t it the case that lots (in raw numbers, not %) of smart people believe irrational things (e.g. religion, health, climate, politics) all the time? When you consider the size of the AI field, there was going to be at least one LeCun right?
Yeah, fair point. But most such irrational beliefs tend to be somewhat outside smart people’s fields of personal expertise. And smart people tend to update if they’re exposed to a lot of skeptical feedback—which LeCun has been, on Twitter. Yet he’s dug in his heels, and become even more anti-safety in recent months.
Maybe in the grand scheme his personal views don’t matter much. But to a psychologist like me, his behavior is both baffling and chilling.