The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Expert: Superintelligence does not imply a desire to dominate humans
“There is this idea, somehow, the desire to, and the ability to dominate, is linked with intelligence. A statement that a lot of people are making, including Jeff Hinton recently, That somehow, as soon as a machine becomes intelligent, it becomes uncontrollable…”
LeCun: AI hard takeoff fears are false; no real-world exponential lasts
“So this is predicated on an assumption that is just false, which is the existence of a hard takeoff. Right? So the fact that the minute you turn on a super intelligent AI system is going to take over the world. And it's going to escape your control and it's go…”
LeCun: Human-level AI will not be achieved using autoregressive LLMs
“Well, so first of all, there is no question that eventually AI systems will understand the world in similar ways that, that humans do perhaps better ways but there will not be autoregressive large language models as a type that we're now talking about.”
LeCun: Autoregressive LLMs will be obsolete within a few years
“So my prediction is that within a few years, nobody in their right mind would use auto-reversive LLMs. They'll go away in favor of something more sophisticated and controllable. They can plan its answer as opposed to just produce one word after the other react…”
LeCun disagrees with Geoffrey Hinton on AI-driven human extinction risk
“So I understand why, why he might have wanted to leave, but I don't agree with him at all with the whole sort of, you know, probability of human extinction or whatever.”
LeCun: AI assistant infrastructure will be forced to be open source
“They would be so pervasive, so much will ride on those systems that I don't think anyone will accept that those assistants be behind the event horizon in a private company. They will insist that the infrastructure is open.”
LeCun: Regulating AI products is fine, but regulating research is nonsense
“So I'm not against regulation. There should be regulation of AI products, particularly the ones that Involve making critical decisions for people, but regulating or slowing down research is complete nonsense.”
Expert: Proprietary LLMs will fall behind open-source models
“The scenario I think will happen, and I'm certainly rooting for, is the scenario I described earlier, where you have some sort of open platform for base LLMs. So base LLMs basically would be seen as a basic infrastructure. TCP, IP, Linux, Apache, completely op…”
LeCun: Current LLMs do not possess human-level intelligence
“So those systems do not have anywhere close to human level intelligence. Okay. Despite what you might think, we are kind of fooled into thinking it because those systems are very fluent with language, but their ability to think, to understand how the world wor…”
LeCun: The belief that smart AI desires dominance is a fantasy
“The second fallacy is that there is this idea somehow that the desire to, and the ability to dominate is linked with intelligence, right? So this is a statement that a lot of people are making, including, you know, my friend Jeff Hinton recently. That somehow,…”
LeCun: Getting AI alignment wrong will not destroy humanity
“It's not like if you get it wrong, it's going to destroy humanity.”
LeCun: Public will reject proprietary AI and demand open-source infrastructure
“They would be so pervasive, so much will ride on, on those systems that I don't think anyone will accept that those assistant being behind Event Horizon in a private company, they will insist that the infrastructure is open.”
LeCun: Autoregressive Large Language Models Do Not Perform Real Planning
“Autoregressive LLMs basically don't do planning, or a very simple form of it.”
LeCun: Proprietary AI models will fall behind open-source models
“So I think the proprietary approaches will actually fall behind.”
LeCun: AI will create as many jobs as it displaces
“No economist believes we're going to run out of jobs because no economist believes that we're going to run out of problems to solve or requirement for human creativity and human communication and stuff like that. So, you know, this is going to create as many j…”
LeCun: AI is the solution to social network harms, not the cause
“So, for example, there's a narrative, a very, very common narrative that AI is the culprit for a lot of the bad side effects of social networks in the past. And in fact, it's completely backwards. AI is the solution to those problems.”
LeCun: Regulating or slowing down AI research is complete nonsense
“Regulating or slowing down research is complete nonsense. It's just obscurantism.”
LeCun: Users will talk to AI assistants instead of searching Google or Wikipedia
“So people are probably going to use this almost exclusively in the future for their interaction with the digital world. You're not gonna go to Google or Wikipedia. You're just gonna talk to your assistant.”
LeCun: AI will create as many jobs as it eliminates
“This is going to create as many jobs as it makes disappear.”
Expert: The ecosystem around open LLMs will create net jobs
“There'll be like a whole economy around this, which will create jobs by the way, not make them disappear.”
LeCun: AI will bring a new renaissance by amplifying human intelligence
“AI is going to bring a new renaissance for humanity, a new form of enlightenment, if you want, because AI is going to amplify everybody's intelligence. It's like every one of us will have a staff of people who are smarter than us and know most things about mos…”
LeCun: AI assistants will replace Google and Wikipedia for digital navigation
“People are probably going to use this almost exclusively in the future for their interaction with the digital world. You know, you're not going to go to Google or Wikipedia. You're just going to talk to your assistant.”
LeCun: AI Systems Using Objective-Driven Planning Will Be Even Smaller
“And I think it's going to make even more progress because if we go towards the design of AI systems, perhaps along the lines of what I described with objectives and planning, I think those systems could actually be even smaller.”
LeCun: Open LLMs will become infrastructure and create net new jobs
“The scenario I think will happen, and I'm certainly waiting for is the scenario I described earlier, where you have some sort of open platform for base LLMs. So base LLMs basically would be seen as a basic infrastructure like, you know, TCP, IP, Linux, Apache,…”
LeCun: Meta and Google lagged OpenAI due to risk, not tech
“It's just that they didn't have the pressure to produce new products, completely new products that had a lot of risk attached to them.”
LeCun: AI-driven mass job loss will take 10 to 15 years
“Is it going to make people lose their job like right away? And no, it's going to take a while. It's going to take 1015 years, you know, possibly more.”
LeCun: DeepMind, Meta FAIR, and Cohere are best positioned for AGI
“In my opinion, the outfits that are best positioned for this are Claire from on one side and the new DeepMind now, which is, you know, DeepMind plus Google brain. There are a lot of people there who are interested in that question, and I think they are probabl…”
LeCun: Deep learning pioneers conspired in early 2000s to revive neural nets
“Joshua, Jeff and I decided in the early 2000 to basically start a conspiracy to You know, revive the interests of the community in, in neural nets by making them work.”
LeCun: AI progress is continuous evolution, not sudden jumps
“And it looks like kind of jumps when you look at it from far away. But when you're in the field, it's more like a continuous evolution.”
LeCun: All of OpenAI and the AI world runs on PyTorch
“ChatGPT was developed on PyTorch. Okay. All OpenAI runs on PyTorch. The entire world, in fact, runs on PyTorch, except Google, because they have their own thing, right?”
LeCun: Meta overhauled News Feed algorithm in 2017 to eliminate propaganda
“The main news feed algorithm was completely changed so that, you know, there was no clickbaits anymore. There was no, like, you know, news Outlets that could like push their content. That was propaganda, basically, you know, much more effort to take down false…”
LeCun: Switzerland is the only European nation matching US academic jobs
“The only European countries that can rival country that rival the US in terms of the quality of job for an academic or a scientist is Switzerland.”
LeCun: All Google Transformer Paper Authors Have Left for Startups
“So you look at the original paper from Google about BERT or Transformers, right? The thing that revolutionized NLP, all of them have left. Okay. They're all in startups.”
LeCun: Key Creators of Meta's LLaMA Have Left for Startups
“Some of the people who produced Llama, the open source LLMs from Meta. So the key people have left already. Okay, to do startups.”
LeCun: Neural network research faced a decade of ridicule starting in 1995
“There was indeed about 10 years when not only nobody was interested in neural nets, but people were even making fun of it, you know, talking about it in sort of disparaging terms.”
LeCun: Transformer scaling with self-supervised learning surprised AI researchers
“The fact that self-supervised learning methods applied to transformer architectures Work amazingly well, and they work, you know, way beyond what we could have expected. The fact that we can do basically train systems to understand language, translate language…”
LeCun: Open-source projects succeed especially when providing basic infrastructure
“So I think that's why, you know, open source projects succeed, particularly when they concern basic infrastructure.”
LeCun: New Technologies Take 15–20 Years to Impact Economic Productivity
“When a new technology is introduced, let's say the PC, right, with, you know, a graphical user interface, the mouse, et cetera, right, in the mid-nineties, how long did it take to have a measurable effect on productivity, you know, which is the amount of wealt…”
LeCun: AI progress enabled automated hate speech removal across hundreds of languages
“And then what the progress of AI over the last few years basically allowed systems to be deployed to do things like taking, take down hate speech relatively reliably in hundreds of different languages, which was basically impossible to do before.”