Yann LeCun is Facebook’s chief AI scientist. He is known as one of the godfathers of deep learning. He joined Facebook in 2013 as the company’s director of AI research. Later, he was named as VP and chief AI Scientist. He is a part of Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team. He is also a computer science professor at N.Y. university, teaching part-time at NYU Center for Data Science and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
In a recent interview at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February 2024, he said that we are far from human-level intelligence. He dismissed the fears that AI models are dangerous. The AI-technology is not even on par with cat-level intelligence. Of course, he is certain that one day AI will surpass human beings, leading to artificial general intelligence or AGI.
The current systems have been trained on public data. They cannot go beyond that. In future, they are likely to be smarter, and will give information better than the search engine.
LeCun, the French scientist has won the 2018 Turing Award with Goffrey Hinton and Youshua Bengio for his contribution to artificial neural network research.
Most advanced AI system today have less common sense than house cat. A cat’s brain has 800 million neurons. If we multiply this figure by 2000, we get the number of synapses (the connections between neurons). That equals the number of parameters in an LLM. Largest LLMs have the same number of parameters as the number of synapses in a cat’s brain. ChatGPT to begin with was powered by GPT-3.5 which had 175 billion parameters. GPT-4 is said to have 220 billion parameters. Maybe, we are at the size of a cat. Still the systems are not as smart as a cat. A cat understands the physical world around it. It remembers it. It can plan complex actions. It can do some reasoning. All this it does better than an LLM. It means conceptually we lack something to get machines as intelligent as animals and other humans. A dog’s brain has about 2 billion neurons, and human brain has about 100 billion.
To get to the AGI level, it may take 10 or may be 20 years. Researchers are overly optimistic.