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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I don't think it's just Moravec's paradox. Moravec's paradox is a consequence of realizing that the world is not as easy as we think. First of all, intelligence is not a linear thing that you can measure with a single number. Can you say that humans are smarter than orangutans? In some ways, yes. But in some ways, orangutans are smarter than humans in a lot of domains.
That allows them to survive in the forest, for example.
Well, IQ can measure approximately something for humans. Mm-hmm. Because humans come in relatively uniform form, right? But it only measures one type of ability that may be relevant for some tasks, but not others. But then if you're talking about other intelligent entities for which the you know, the basic things that are easy to them is very different, then it doesn't mean anything.
So intelligence is a collection of skills and an ability to acquire new skills efficiently, right? And the collection of skills that a particular intelligent entity possess or is capable of learning quickly is different from the collection of skills of another one.
And because it's a multidimensional thing, the set of skills is a high dimensional space, you can't measure, you cannot compare two things as to whether one is more intelligent than the other. It's multidimensional.
Okay, so AI doomers imagine all kinds of catastrophe scenarios of how AI could escape or control and basically kill us all. And that relies on a whole bunch of assumptions that are mostly false. So the first assumption is that the emergence of superintelligence is going to be an event. That at some point we're going to figure out the secret and we'll turn on a machine that is superintelligent.
And because we've never done it before, it's going to take over the world and kill us all. That is false. It's not going to be an event. We're going to have systems that are like... as smart as a cat, have all the characteristics of human-level intelligence, but their level of intelligence would be like a cat or a parrot, maybe, or something. And then we're going to work our way up
to kind of make those things more intelligent. And as we make them more intelligent, we're also going to put some guardrails in them and learn how to kind of put some guardrails so they behave properly. And we're not going to do this with just one. It's not going to be one effort. It's going to be lots of different people doing this.
And some of them are going to succeed at making intelligent systems that are controllable and safe and have the right guardrails. And if some other goes rogue, then we can use the good ones to go against the rogue ones. So it's going to be my smart AI police against your rogue AI. So it's not going to be like we're going to be exposed to a single rogue AI that's going to kill us all.
That's just not happening. Now, there is another fallacy, which is the fact that because the system is intelligent, it necessarily wants to take over.
There are several arguments that make people scared of this, which I think are completely false as well. One of them is, in nature, it seems to be that the more intelligent species are the ones that end up dominating the other, and even extinguishing the others, sometimes by design, sometimes just by mistake.
And so there is sort of thinking by which you say, well, if AI systems are more intelligent than us, surely they're going to eliminate us, if not by design, simply because they don't care about us. And that's just preposterous for a number of reasons. First reason is they're not going to be a species. They're not going to be a species that competes with us.
They're not going to have the desire to dominate because the desire to dominate is something that has to be hardwired into an intelligent system. It is hardwired in humans. It is hardwired in baboons, in chimpanzees, in wolves, not in orangutans. The species in which this desire to dominate or submit or attain status in other ways is is specific to social species.
Non-social species like orangutans don't have it, right? And they are as smart as we are, almost, right?
Well, there's all kinds of incentive to make AI systems submissive to humans, right? I mean, this is the way we're going to build them, right? And so then people say, oh, but look at LLMs. LLMs are not controllable. And they're right. LLMs are not controllable. But object-driven AI, so systems that derive their answers by optimization of an objective, means they have to optimize this objective.
And that objective can include guardrails. One guardrail is... Obey humans. Another gut reality is don't obey humans if it's hurting other humans.
Yes. Maybe in a book.
No, of course. So this is not a simple problem, right? I mean, designing those guardrails so that the system behaves properly is not going to be a simple issue for which there is a silver bullet, for which you have a mathematical proof that the system can be safe.
It's going to be a very progressive, iterative design system where we put those guardrails in such a way that the system behaves properly. And sometimes they're going to do something that was unexpected because the guardrail wasn't right, and we're going to correct them so that they do it right.
The idea somehow that we can't get it slightly wrong because if we get it slightly wrong, we all die is ridiculous. We're just going to go progressively. And it's just going to be, the analogy I've used many times is turbojet design. How did we figure out how to make turbojets so unbelievably reliable, right? I mean, those are like, you know, incredibly complex things
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