Yann LeCun
speaker
384 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 20 Jun
Yann LeCun’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And it's true in all democracies around the world. So there is a future. which is already happening, where every single one of our interaction with the digital world will be mediated by AI systems, AI assistants, right? We're going to have smart glasses.
You can already buy them from Meta, the Ray-Ban Meta, where you can talk to them, and they are connected with an LLM, and you can get answers on any question you have. Or you can be looking at a...
monument and there is a camera in the in the system that in in the glasses you can ask it like what can you tell me about this uh building on this monument you can be looking at a menu in a foreign language and the thing will translate it for you or you can do real-time translation if you speak different languages so
a lot of our interactions with the digital world are going to be mediated by those systems in the near future. Increasingly, the search engines that we're going to use are not going to be search engines. They're going to be dialogue systems that will just ask a question. And it will answer and then point you to perhaps an appropriate reference for it. But here is the thing.
We cannot afford those systems to come from a handful of companies on the west coast of the U.S., Because those systems will constitute the repository of all human knowledge. And we cannot have that be controlled by a small number of people, right? It has to be diverse. For the same reason, the press has to be diverse. So how do we get a diverse set of AI assistants?
It's very expensive and difficult to train a base model, a base LLM at the moment. In the future, it might be something different, but at the moment, that's an LLM. So only a few companies can do this properly. And If some of those top systems are open source, anybody can use them. Anybody can fine tune them.
If we put in place some systems that allows any group of people, whether they are individual citizens, groups of citizens, government organizations, NGOs, companies, whatever, to take those open source systems
systems, AI systems, and fine-tune them for their own purpose on their own data, then we're going to have a very large diversity of different AI systems that are specialized for all of those things, right?
So I tell you, I talked to the French government quite a bit, and the French government will not accept that the digital diet of all their citizens be controlled by three companies on the West Coast of the U.S. That's just not acceptable, right? It's a danger to democracy, regardless of how well-intentioned those companies are. And it's also a danger to local culture, to values, to language.
I was talking with the founder of Infosys in India. He's funding a project to fine-tune Lama 2, the open-source model produced by Meta. so that Lama Thu speaks all 22 official languages in India. It's very important for people in India.
I was talking to a former colleague of mine, Moustapha Sissé, who used to be a scientist at FAIR, and then moved back to Africa, created a research lab for Google in Africa, and now has a new startup called Kera.
And what he's trying to do is basically have LLM that speaks the local languages in Senegal so that people can have access to medical information, because they don't have access to doctors. It's a very small number of doctors per capita in Senegal. You can't have any of this unless you have open-source platforms.
With open-source platforms, you can have AI systems that are not only diverse in terms of political opinions or things of that type, but in terms of language, culture, value systems, political opinions. technical abilities in various domains. And you can have an industry, an ecosystem of companies that fine tune those open source systems for vertical applications in industry, right?
You have, I don't know, a publisher has thousands of books and they want To build a system that allows a customer to just ask a question about the content of any of their books, you need to train on their proprietary data. You have a company, we have one within Meta, it's called MetaMate, and it's basically an LLM that can answer any question about internal stuff about the company. Very useful.
A lot of companies want this. A lot of companies want this not just for their employees, but also for their customers, to take care of their customers. So the only way you're going to have an AI industry, the only way you're going to have AI systems that are not uniquely biased is if you have open source platforms on top of which any group can build specialized systems.
So the inevitable direction of history is that the vast majority of AI systems will be built on top of open source platforms.
Okay, so you have several business models, right? The business model that Meta is built around is, is you offer a service and the financing of that service is either through ads or through business customers. So for example, if you have an LLM that can help a mom and pop pizza place, by, you know, talking to the customers through WhatsApp.
And so the customers can just order a pizza and the system will just, you know, ask them like, what topping do you want or what size, blah, blah, blah. Um, the business will pay for that. Okay. That's a model. Um, And otherwise, you know, if it's a system that is on the more kind of classical services, it can be ad supported or, you know, there's several models.
But the point is, if you have a big enough potential customer base and you need to build a system anyway for them, it doesn't hurt you to actually distribute it in open source.
Well, no, the bet is more, we already have a huge user base and customer base. Ah, right. Right, so it's going to be useful to them. Whatever we offer them is going to be useful, and there is a way to derive revenue from this. Sure. And it doesn't hurt that we provide that system or the base model, the foundation model, in open source for others to build applications on top of it, too.
Showing 241–260 of 384 · page 13 of 20
← Previous
Next →