Yann recently gave a presentation at MIT on Objective-Driven AI with his specific proposal being based upon a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture.
He claims that his proposal will make AI safe and steerable, so I thought it was worthwhile copying the slides at the end which provide a very quick and accessible overview of his perspective:
Here's a link to the talk itself.
I find it interesting how he says that there is no such thing as AGI, but acknowledges that machines will "eventually surpass human intelligence in all domains where humans are intelligent" as that would meet most people's definition of AGI.
I also observe that he has framed his responses to safety on "How to solve the alignment problem?". I think this is important. It suggests that even people who think aligning AGI will be easy have started to think a bit more about this problem and I see this as a victory in and of itself.
You may also find it interesting to read Steven Byrnes' skeptical comments on this proposal.
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?
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.