Yann LeCun is an AI pioneer, professor at New York University, and the chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms (META). He is one of the most recognized figures in AI technology, having co-received the prestigious 2018 ACM Turing Award also called the Nobel Prize of computing for his research around deep learning techniques. Recently, in the news, LeCun has been quite vocal as he questioned the letter from technology execs such as Elon Musk and other AI luminaries to pause AI development for six months.
LeCun discussed with Barron’s Tech about the current state of AI and the inexorable rise of ChatGPT and the technology behind large language models. He explained the functioning of ChatGPT as “a super powerful predictive keyboard” where the model is trained upon a large amount of data. Despite the impressive capabilities of ChatGPT, LeCun is of the view that they are not suitable to answer factual questions or cause any effective distinctions as they just reuse whatever they have seen in their training data. He also believes that technology giants are well aware of the potential risks posed by AI, and therefore have been rightly mindful of their rollouts.
LeCun is of opinion that Open AI led by Elon Musk has been as of now at the foremost in terms of LLMs technology as it started the process much earlier than others. He fears that a moratorium on AI research proposed in the letter won’t help in any way as no one is likely to do much about it. The doomsayers in the camp, according to LeCun, are largely misinformed as the lack of controllability of the AI system has been exaggerated. He also underscored that flood of machine-generated content on the internet, although it is concerning, will be managed by human resilience.
Meta Platforms, founded in 2013, is an American technology company mainly focusing on artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The company is internationally renowned for its high-quality AI powered software and products. With expertise in machine learning and natural language processing, Meta Platforms have developed several products such as MetaExtract, MetaCrawl, MetaAnalytics, MetaLearn and MetaChatbot . Its flagship product MetaBot, helps organizations to automate customer support in a language and platform of their choice.
Yann LeCun, is a prominent figure in the field of AI. He has been actively involved in research for over three decades, primarily for the development of deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks. He joined Meta Platforms in 2013 and is the company’s Chief AI Scientist. Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio together received the Turing Award for their work in the area of deep learning and for laying the foundations of modern AI. His research has been instrumental in driving progress in AI, making significant advancements in the area of computer vision and natural language processing.
