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
Some work at FAIR, one called Toolformer, which was a couple years ago, and some more recent work on planning. But I don't think we have a good solution for any of that. Then there is the question of hierarchical planning. So the example I mentioned of planning a trip from New York to Paris, that's hierarchical. But almost every action that we take involves hierarchical planning in some sense.
And we really have absolutely no idea how to do this. There's zero demonstration of hierarchical planning in AI. where the various levels of representations that are necessary have been learned. We can do two-level hierarchical planning when we design the two levels. For example, you have a dog-like robot. You want it to go from the living room to the kitchen.
You can plan a path that avoids the obstacle. And then you can send this to a lower-level planner that figures out how to move the legs to kind of follow that trajectory. So that works, but that two-level planning is designed by hand. We specify what the proper levels of abstraction, the representation at each level of abstraction have to be. How do you learn this?
How do you learn that hierarchical representation of action plans? With Cognites and deep learning, we can train the system to learn hierarchical representations of percepts. What is the equivalent when what you're trying to represent are action plans?
For example.
No, but even doing something fairly simple like a household task, like cooking or something.
I love that question. We can make humanity smarter with AI. Okay. I mean, AI basically will amplify human intelligence. It's as if every one of us will have a staff of smart AI assistants. They might be smarter than us. They'll do our bidding. perhaps execute tasks in ways that are much better than we could do ourselves because they'd be smarter than us.
And so it's like everyone would be the boss of a staff of super smart virtual people. So we shouldn't feel threatened by this any more than we should feel threatened by being the manager of a group of people, some of whom are more intelligent than us. I certainly have a lot of experience with this, of having people working with me who are smarter than me. That's actually a wonderful thing.
So having machines that are smarter than us that assist us in our work, all of our tasks, our daily lives, whether it's professional or personal, I think would be an absolutely wonderful thing. Because intelligence is the most, is the commodity that is most in demand.
That's really what, I mean, all the mistakes that humanity makes is because of lack of intelligence, really, or lack of knowledge, which is, you know, related. So making people smarter, we just can only be better. I mean, for the same reason that, you know, public education is a good thing. And books are a good thing. And the internet is also a good thing intrinsically.
And even social networks are a good thing if you run them properly. It's difficult, but, you know, you can. Because, you know, it's... helps the communication of information and knowledge and the transmission of knowledge. So AI is going to make humanity smarter.
And the analogy I've been using is the fact that perhaps an equivalent event in the history of humanity to what might be provided by generalization of AI assistant is the invention of the printing press. It made everybody smarter. The fact that People could have access to books. Books were a lot cheaper than they were before.
And so a lot more people had an incentive to learn to read, which wasn't the case before. And people became smarter. It enabled the enlightenment, right? There wouldn't be an enlightenment without the printing press. It enabled... philosophy, rationalism, escape from religious doctrine, democracy, science,
And certainly without this, there wouldn't have been the American Revolution or the French Revolution. And so we'd still be under feudal regimes, perhaps. And so it completely transformed the world because people became smarter and kind of learned about things.
Now, it also created 200 years of essentially religious conflicts in Europe, because the first thing that people read was the Bible and realized that perhaps there was a different interpretation of the Bible than what the priests were telling them. And so that created the Protestant movement and created the Rift.
And in fact, the Catholic Church didn't like the idea of the printing press, but they had no choice. And so it had some bad effects and some good effects. I don't think anyone today would say that the invention of the printing press had an overall negative effect, despite the fact that it created 200 years of religious conflicts in Europe. Now, compare this
And I thought I was very proud of myself to come up with this analogy, but realized someone else came with the same idea before me. Compare this with what happened in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire banned the printing press for 200 years. And he didn't ban it for all languages, only for Arabic.
You could actually print books in Latin or Hebrew or whatever in the Ottoman Empire, just not in Arabic. And I thought it was because the rulers just wanted to preserve the control over the population and the dogma, religious dogma and everything. But after talking with the UAE minister of AI, Omar Al-Olamar, he told me, no, there was another reason.
And the other reason was that it was to preserve the corporation of calligraphers. There's like an art form, which is writing those beautiful Arabic poems or whatever religious text in this thing. And it was a very powerful corporation of scribes, basically, that kind of ran a big chunk of the empire. And we couldn't put them out of business.
So they banned the Beijing press in part to protect that business. Now, what's the analogy for AI today? Who are we protecting by banning AI? Who are the people who are asking that AI be regulated to protect their jobs? And of course, it's a real question of what is going to be the effect of technological transformation like AI on the job market. and the labor market.
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