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 83 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
LeCun: Scaling up LLMs will not produce human-level AI
“We are not going to get to human level AI by just scaling up LLMs. This is just not going to happen.”
LeCun: OpenAI's technology is well-engineered but not scientifically innovative
“Their technology is not particularly innovative from the scientific point of view. It's very well engineered. So they put together, you know, large scale scaled up system with trained with very well curated data. I mean, they know what they're doing. But in te…”
LeCun: Human-level AI will not happen within two years
“Whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues it's not going to happen within the next two years. There's absolutely no way in hell to, you know, pardon my French.”
LeCun: AI cannot reach human-level intelligence without world models and planning
“And so until we build systems that have some internal model of the world, it allows them to kind of simulate the world if you want, some way of generating actions on the world to use tools like a calculator or something of that, or interrogating a database or …”
LeCun: Inventing new things requires skills language models cannot achieve
“Inventing new things, you know, requires a type of skill and abilities that you're not gonna get from NLMs.”
LeCun: Open-source AI researchers will progress faster than closed competitors
“The people who share their research are going to move faster than the ones that don't.”
LeCun: Large language models are incapable of inventing new things
“We also know that they can hallucinate facts that aren't true but they're really, in their purest form, they are incapable of inventing new things.”
LeCun: Breakthrough scientific AI will not be an LLM
“No, not, not in the current form. I mean, and whatever form of AI would be able to do that will not be LLMs. They might use LLMs as one component.”
LeCun: Chain-of-thought prompting does not produce genuine reasoning in LLMs
“One simple way of
getting NNMs to kind of appear to reason is chain of thought, right?
So you basically tell them to generate more tokens than they really need to in the hope that in the process of generating those tokens, they're going to devote more computa…”
LeCun: Nobody knows how to build agentic systems beyond regurgitating plans
“Everybody's talking about agentic systems. Nobody has any idea how to build them other than basically regurgitating plans that have, the system has already been trained on.”
LeCun: Scaling up LLMs will not produce human-level AI
“We are not going to get to human level AI by just scaling up LLMs. This is just not going to happen.”
LeCun: Digital superintelligence will not happen within two years
“Whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues it's not going to happen within the next two years. There's absolutely no way in hell to, you know, pardon my French. The, you know, the idea that we're going to have, you know, a country of gen…”
LeCun: AI cannot reach human-level intelligence by training on text alone
“And it tells you clearly that we're not going to get to human level AI by just training on text. It's just not a rich enough source of information.”
LeCun: Pixel-level video generation will not solve AI world understanding
“Is the right way to approach this problem to train better and better video generation systems? And my answer to this is absolutely no. The problem of understanding the world does not go through the solution to the, to generating video at the pixel level.”
LeCun: Open source AI innovates faster than proprietary models can match
“Open source progress is faster and you know, a lot more innovation can take place in the open source world, which the proprietary world may have a hard time catching up with.”
LeCun: ChatGPT is not a major step toward human-level AI
“The short answer is it's not a, Particularly big step towards you know, more like human, human level intelligence.”
LeCun: OpenAI has become a contract research house for Microsoft
“They've become sort of a contract research house for Microsoft to some extent.”
LeCun: Startups absolutely cannot do fundamental research due to funding
“You can't, absolutely cannot do research in a startup. You just can't because you just don't have the funds, right?”
LeCun: Unclear whether Google's investment in DeepMind has been worth it
“The economic return after 10 years or so, or nine years that Google has gotten from DeepMind, you know, is not clear. It's worth their investment.”
LeCun: Current LLMs have no real knowledge of physical reality
“Because the understanding that those, the current systems have of you know, the underlying reality that language expresses is extremely shallow. So those systems have only been trained with text a huge amount of text. So they can regurgitate texts that they've…”
LeCun: Most core ChatGPT techniques originated at Google and Meta
“Most of the technology underlying techniques used in ChatGPT have been invented at Google and Meta.”
LeCun: Autonomous AI systems will inevitably develop emotions
“So if you have autonomous AI systems that work by optimizing objectives and they have the ability to predict they are going to have emotions. It's inseparable from autonomous intelligence.”
LeCun: AI models should legally be allowed to emulate artistic styles
“Human artists are
Absolutely authorized to get inspired and straight down copy someone else's style.
that happens absolutely all the time in in art.
And so would it make sense to apply a different rule for, let's call them artificial artists, right?
That, tha…”
LeCun: Most of Meta's AI capex is for inference infrastructure
“Most of the investment, at least for, from the meta side is investment in infrastructure for inference.”
LeCun: AI infrastructure will be utilized even without architectural breakthroughs
“Even if the revolution of the new paradigm doesn't come, you know, within three years, this infrastructure is going to be used. There's very little question about that.”
LeCun: Autonomous driving proves achieving the last percent of reliability is hardest
“It's basically you know, why we had super impressive, you know, autonomous driving demos 10 years ago But we still don't have level five self-driving cars, right? It's the last mile that's really difficult so to speak for cars. You know, it's, you know, the la…”
LeCun: AI will eventually ask its own questions, taking considerable time
“You know, is, are we going to have eventually AI architectures, AI systems that are capable of not just answering questions that are already there, but solving, giving new solutions to problems that we specify? The answer is yes, eventually. Not with current L…”
LeCun: LLM scaling hits diminishing returns after exhausting natural text data
“Well, I don't know if I would call it a wall, but it's certainly a diminishing return in the sense that, you know, we've kind of run out of natural text data to train those LLMs where they're already trained with, you know, on the order of you know, 10 to the …”
LeCun: Meta AI users are less active than ChatGPT users
“Yeah, but they, but it's not used as much as ChatGPT. Right. So the users are not as intense.”
LeCun: Novel AI architectures will reach practical scale in 3 to 5 years
“The question is, you know, when is this going to go from interesting research papers demonstrating a new capability with a new architecture to, you know, architectures at scale that You know, are practical for a lot of applications and can find solutions to ne…”
LeCun: AGI will not be a single event or come from one company
“There's not going to be like a day Before which there is no AGI and after which we have AGI. This is not going to be an event. It's going to be continuous conceptual ideas that as time goes by are going to be made bigger and to scale and going to work better, …”
LeCun: Meta's V-JEPA exhibits physical common sense by detecting impossible events
“And you measure the prediction error as you show the video to the system. And when something impossible occurs, the prediction error goes, goes through the roof. And so you can detect if the system has integrated some idea of what, you know, is possible physic…”
LeCun: Only large, profitable corporations can economically sustain industry AI research
“The economic model The only one I know outside of universities and philanthropy is industry research lab inside of a large company that has, that is profitable and is sufficiently well-established in this market that it can think for the long term and invest i…”
LeCun: Most human knowledge is non-linguistic, not captured in text
“How much of human knowledge is present and described in text? And my answer to this is a tiny portion. Like most of human knowledge is not actually language related. It's completely non-linguistic.”
LeCun: LLMs lack internal world models for physical prediction
“LLMs do not have that. They don't have any internal model of the world that allows them to predict.”
LeCun: OpenAI relies on impressive demos to raise money from Microsoft
“And they have to produce impressive demos because that's the economic model. That's how they're going to raise money from Microsoft and others.”
LeCun: LLMs will not ruin scientific conferences because submitting garbage ruins careers
“And I thought that was a completely ridiculous argument, because the reason why you might want to submit a paper is because you want to prop up your CV, and so you have to put your own name on it. Otherwise, what's the point? And if you put your own name and i…”
LeCun: Prediction and planning from forecasted consequences define intelligence
“What characterizes intelligence is the ability to predict, first of all, and then the ability to use those prediction Those predictions as a tool to plan by predicting the consequences of actions you might take. Prediction is the essence of intelligence.”
LeCun: Teenagers will run generative AI models from home by 2025
“This is the wrong way to frame this because within a year or two, you know, any teenager in their parents' basement is going to be able to do this.”
LeCun: Supervised and reinforcement learning do not reflect biological learning
“The type of learning that we are currently able to reproduce in machine, which is supervised learning and reinforcement learning do not seem to Reflect what we observe in humans and animals. There is another type of learning, another paradigm of learning that …”
LeCun: Current machine learning replicates System 1 thinking without reasoning
“Currently what we can do in machine learning is more like the system when the stuff that, you know, here is an input, here is an output that does not re require reasoning if you want.”
LeCun: Reinforcement learning cannot safely or efficiently train self-driving cars
“If we were to use, let's say, reinforcement learning to train a self-driving car to drive itself,
It would have to drive itself for millions of hours and cause, you know, until thousands of accidents and destroy itself multiple times before it learns to drive …”
LeCun: Face Detection in Cortex Is Rapidly Learned, Not Innately Hardwired
“Face detection can be learned in minutes. If you're a baby, your vergence is bad. Your focus is, is basically fixed at a relatively short range. So the only thing you see during the first weeks of your life are faces and nipples, essentially. So, you know, and…”
LeCun: Human and animal reasoning is mental simulation, not logic
“A lot of reasoning in certainly in animals and in humans is not logical reasoning. It's basically simulation. Or analogical reasoning, which kind of similar.”
LeCun: AI's missing key component is predictive world models
“The key element in this form of intelligence is your ability to build models of the world, predictive models of the world. And that's what we're missing. Okay. That's what we need to figure out how to do with machines.”
LeCun: World models, not more data, will solve AI common sense
“So I think this is not going to be solved in my opinion by you know, more tweaks on the architectures and more training data and things like this. I mean, it may be mitigated, but I think it's not going to be fixed by that. I think it's going to be fixed by sy…”
LeCun: Most Human Knowledge Is Not Represented in Any Text
“Like most of human knowledge is not represented in any text in existence.”
LeCun: True AI Intelligence Requires Grounding in a World with Physics
“So I'm one of those people who believe that truly intelligent systems will need to acquire knowledge will need to be grounded in some reality. It could be a simulated reality. It could be a virtual world. But it has to be an environment that has its own logic …”