Judging fish by their ability to climb trees.

We don't understand intelligence.

But we do understand vision and hearing. We have for over 50 years. We've implemented them classically and described them with physics. Game engines, graphics pipelines, synthesizers, codecs, compression, digital image processing, ... the field is vast and productive.

Our mastery over signals is why I'm so bullish on diffusion and AI for images, video, and audio regardless with whatever happens with LLMs.

And if this tech cycle only improves our audio-visual experience and makes games and film more accessible, it'll still be revolutionary and a step function improvement over what came before.

I recently wrote a small essay on my field of expertise and asked chatgpt o1 about it. It consistently misunderstood my arguments, and construed correct sounding but subtly wrong interpretations and explanations.

I wouldn't trust it about any subject I don't dominate so it feels kinda pointless to use it at all.

I don't think that's correct. As I understand it, O1 can use reinforcement learning to optimize its chain of thought, but each individual "thought" is still subject to the performance of the LLM.

Therefore, while it can generate new strategies to approach a problem, the implementation of each step within the strategy is limited by a probabilistic approach.

Contrast that with AlphaZero, which can come up with strategies that are 100% unique (in theory), since it isn't constrained by any human training.

I think O1 is a step forward, but not a massive leap in technology.

I don't think it is comparable to alpha zero, because in the latter case there is an easily verifiable endpoint: whether it won the match or not. With o1 they still rely on human-curated "correct" answers; the system is not able to decide by itself what a correct answer is like alpha zero does.

Thus, while it leads to improved reasoning vs prior art, it is not yet bootstrapping. It may be useful in constrained fields like coming up with proofs of theorems, though.

You still will need clear benchmarks as the reward for RL. With Chess, the rules are simple but you may not have a clear loss function for a complicated architectural challenge.

> He is highly knowledgeable in his field

Indeed. It seems to me that he has a type of personality common in skilled engineers. He is competent and makes informed decisions, but does not necessarily explain them well (or at all if they feel trivial enough), is certain of his logic (which often sounds like arrogance), and does not seem to have much patience.

He is great at what he does but he really is not a spokesman. His technical insights are often very interesting, though.

I would suspect any possible future AGI-like progress would be some sort of ensemble. LLMs may be a piece of the puzzle, but they aren't a single model to AGI solution.

That's not what he's saying at all, though.

What he's saying is that he thinks the current techniques for AI (e.g., LLMs) are near the limits of what you can achieve with such techniques and are thus a dead-end for future research; also consequently, hyperventilation about AI superintelligence and the like is extremely irresponsible. It's actually a substantial critique of AI today in its actual details, albeit one modulated by popular press reporting that's dumbing it down for popular consumption.

His point is that lots of AI folks are framing intelligence incorrectly by overvaluing surface knowledge or ability to be trained to solve constrained problems, when cats have deeper cognitive abilities like planning and rich spatial reasoning which are far beyond the reach of any AI in 2024.

ANNs are extremely useful tools because they can process all sorts of information humans find useful: unlike animals or humans, ANNs don't have their own will, don't get bored or frustrated, and can focus on whatever you point them at. But in terms of core cognitive abilities - not surface knowledge, not impressive tricks, and certainly not LLM benchmarks - it is hard to say ANNs are smarter than a spider. (In fact they seem dumber than jumping spiders, which are able to form novel navigational plans in completely unfamiliar manmade environments. Even web-spinning spiders have no trouble spinning their webs in cluttered garages or pantries; would a transformer ANN be able to do that if it was trained on bushes and trees?)

Statements like "It doesnt seem plausible", "it doesn't seem likely" aren't the strongest arguments. How things seem to us is based on what we've seen happen before. None of us has witnessed humanity replace itself with something that we dont understand before.

Our intuition isn't a good guide here. Intuitions are honed through repeated exposure and feedback, and we clearly don't have that in this domain.

Even though it doesn't feel dangerous, we can navigate this by reasoning through it. We understand that intelligence trumps brawn (e.g. Humans don't out-claw a tiger, we master it with intelligence). We understand that advances in AI have been very rapid, and that even though current AI doesnt feel dangerous, current AI turns into much more advanced future AI very quickly. And we understand that we dont really understand how these things work. We "control them safely" through mechanisms similar to how evolution controls us: theough the objective function. That shouldn't fill us with confidence because we find loopholes in evolution's objective function left and right like contraception, hyper-palatable foods, tiktok, etc.

All these lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that what we're building is dangerous to us.

> just that existential fears like Skynet scenarios don't strike me as plausible.

What's the most plausible (even if you find it implausible) disaster scenario you came across in your research? It's a little surprising to see someone who has seriously looked into these ideas describe the bundle of them as "like Skynet."

> it just doesn't seem likely

It is likely conditional on the price of compute dropping the way it has been.

If you can basically simulate a human brain on a $1000 machine, you don't really need to employ any AI researchers.

Of course, there has been some fear that the current models are a year away from FOOMing, but that does seem to be just the hype talking.

On the other hand, we can wipe our civilization (with or without AI) without needing anything as sophisticated as Skynet.

I believe my cats sometimes get frustrated with the limitations of their own vocalizations and try to work around them when communicating with me. If, say, they want a treat, they are only able to meow and perform "whiny" body motions, and maybe I'll give them pets or throw a ball instead. So they have adapted a bit:

- both of them will spit regular kibble out in front of me when they want a fancier treat (cats are hilarious)

- the boy cat has developed very specific "sweet meows" (soft, high-pitched) for affection and "needy meows" (loud, full-chested) for toys or food; for the first few years he would simply amp up the volume and then give a frustrated growl when I did the wrong thing

- the lady cat (who only has two volumes, "yell" and "scream"), instead stands near what she wants before meowing; bedroom for cuddles, water bowl for treats, hallway or office for toys

- the lady cat was sick a while back and had painful poops; for weeks afterwards if she wanted attention and I was busy she would pretend to poop and pretend to be in pain, manipulating me into dropping my work and checking on her

It goes both ways, I've developed ways of communicating with them over the years:

- the lady is skittish but loves laying in bed with me, so I sing "gotta get up, little pup" in a particular way; she will then get up and give me space to leave the bed, without me scaring her with a sudden movement

- I don't lose my patience with them often, but they understand my anxious/exasperated tone of voice and don't push their luck too much (note that some of this is probably shared mammalian instinct)

- the boy sometimes bullies the lady, and I'll raise my voice at him; despite being otherwise skittish and scared of loud noises, the lady seems to understand that I am mad at the boy because of his actions and there's nothing to be alarmed by

Sometimes I think the focus on "context-free" (or at least context-lite) symbolic language, essentially unique to humans, makes us lose focus on the fact that communication is far older than the dinosaurs, and that maybe further progress on language AI should focus on communication itself, rather than symbol processing with communication as a side effect.

Maybe AI can translate

And as Marvin Minsky taught us, which is probably one of the most profound insights in the entire field, talking seems like an accomplishment to us because it's the least developed part of our capacities. It's so conscious a task not because it's a sign of intellect but because it's the least developed and most novel thing our brains do, which is why it's also likely the fastest to learn for a machine.

Moving as smoothly as a cat and navigating the world is the part that actually took our brains millions of years to learn, and movement is effortless not because it's easy but because it took so long to master, so it's also going to be the most difficult thing to teach a machine.

The cognitive stuff is the dumb part, and that's why we have chess engines, pocket calculators and chatbots before we have emotional machines, artificial plumbers and robots that move like spiders.

Or write code. Or write songs. Or create paintings. Or write essays.

The whole comparison is stupid, and inexplicable at LeCun's level of play. AI is not a model of a human brain, or a cat brain, or a parrot brain, or any other kind of brain. It's something else, something that did not exist in any form just a few years ago.

You’re free to concoct a conspiracy that he’s just a puppet for Meta’s supposed business interests*, but that doesn’t change the validity of his claims.

* pretty sure any revenue from commercial Llama licenses are a rounding error at best

> commoditize AI via Open Source models

Sounds like we should be fully supporting them then.

You don't have to assume malice, he is a strong believer in liberalism so naturally he would argue whatever leads to less regulation. Even if he thought AI was dangerous he would still believe that corporations are better suited to combat that threat than any government.

Its similar to how the WSJ journalist would never ask him what he thinks about the larger effects of the "deindustrialization" of knowledge-based jobs caused by AI. Not because the journalist is malicious, its just the shared, subconscious ideology.

People don't need a reason to protect capital interests, even poor people on the very bottom will protect it.

If you don't call it intelligence you miss the enormous political and social opportunity to go down in the history as the pioneer of AI regulation (:

It's referring to the fact that cats are able to do tasks like multistage planning, which he asserts current AIs are unable to do.

Out of curiosity, would you say a person with locked-in syndrome[0] is no longer intelligent?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome