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
pieces of hardware that run at really high temperatures for 20 hours at a time sometimes. We can fly halfway around the world on a two-engine jetliner at near the speed of sound. How incredible is this? It's just unbelievable. Did we do this because we invented a general principle of how to make turbojets safe? No.
It took decades to kind of fine-tune the design of those systems so that they were safe. Is there a separate group within General Electric or Snekma or whatever that is specialized in turbojet safety? No, the design is all about safety because a better turbojet is also a safer turbojet. So a more reliable one. It's the same for AI. Do you need specific provisions to make AI safe?
No, you need to make better AI systems and they will be safe because they are designed to be more useful and more controllable.
So that AI system designed by Vladimir Putin or whatever, or his minions, you know, is going to be... Trying to talk to every American to convince them to vote for whoever pleases Putin or whatever, or rile people up against each other as they've been trying to do. They're not going to be talking to you. They're going to be talking to your AI assistant.
which is going to be as smart as theirs, right? That AI, because as I said, in the future, every single one of your interaction with the digital world will be mediated by your AI assistant. So the first thing you're going to ask is, is this a scam? Like, is this thing like telling me the truth? It's not even going to be able to get to you because it's only going to talk to your AI system.
Your AI system is not even going to... It's going to be like a spam filter, right? You're not even seeing the email, the spam email, right? It's automatically put in a folder that you never see. It's going to be the same thing. That AI system that tries to convince you of something is going to be talking to your AI system, which is going to be at least as smart as it is.
And it's going to say, this is spam. It's not even going to bring it to your attention.
That's the history of the world. History of the world is, you know, whenever there is a progress someplace, there is a countermeasure. And, you know, it's a cat and mouse game.
No. As I said, it's not going to be an event. It's going to be continuous progress. And whenever one breakthrough occurs, it's going to be widely disseminated really quickly, probably first within industry. I mean, this is not a domain where government or military organizations are particularly innovative, and they're in fact way behind.
And so this is going to come from industry and this kind of information disseminates extremely quickly. We've seen this over the last few years, right? Where you have a new, like, you know, even take AlphaGo, this was reproduced within three months, even without like particularly detailed information.
No, but even if there is, just the fact that you know that something is possible makes you realize that it's worth investing the time to actually do it. You may be the second person to do it, but you'll do it. And same for all the innovations of self-supervised learning, transformers, decoder-only architectures, LLMs.
I mean, those things, you don't need to know exactly the details of how they work to know that it's possible because it's deployed and then it's getting reproduced. And then people who work for those companies move. They go from one company to another and the information disseminates.
What makes the success of the US tech industry and Silicon Valley in particular is exactly that, is because information circulates really, really quickly. and this, you know, disseminates very quickly. And so, you know, the whole region sort of is ahead because of that circulation of information.
Well, there is a natural fear of new technology and the impact it can have on society. And people have kind of instinctive reaction to the world they know being threatened by major transformations that are either cultural phenomena or technological revolutions. And they fear for their culture, they fear for their job, they fear for the future of their children and their way of life.
So any change is feared. And you see this, you know, along history, like any technological revolution or cultural phenomenon was always accompanied by, you know, groups or reaction in the media that basically attributed all the problems, the current problems of society to that particular change, right? Electricity was going to kill everyone.
At some point, you know, the train was going to be a horrible thing because, you know, you can't breathe past 50 kilometers an hour. And so there's a wonderful website called the Pessimist Archive, which has all those newspaper clips of all the horrible things people imagine would arrive because of either technological innovation or a cultural phenomenon. You know,
These are wonderful examples of jazz or comic books being blamed for unemployment or young people not wanting to work anymore and things like that. That has existed for centuries. It's knee-jerk reactions. The question is, do we embrace change or do we resist it? And what are the real dangers as opposed to the imagined ones?
Well, that's exactly why we need open source platforms.
Yeah. Again, I think the answer to this is open source platforms and then enabling a widely diverse set of people to build AI assistants that represent the diversity of cultures, opinions, languages, and value systems across the world, so that you're not bound to just be brainwashed by a particular way of thinking because of a single AI entity.
So, I mean, I think it's a really, really important question for society. And the problem I'm seeing is that, which is why I've been so vocal and sometimes a little sardonic about it. Never stop. Never stop, Jan.
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