Facebook’s AI chief scientist Yann LeCun believes that the status of AI today is far away from reaching . semblance of sentience. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO expresses exactly the opposite view, and says within five years AI will be fairly advanced. Maybe, his forecasting is based on his vested interest — he supplies the chips to advance the AI race. LeCun says that society is likely to reach cat-level or dog-level AI competence before reaching human-level competence. The focus on language models is not sufficient to take us to human-level AI systems.

Text alone cannot train a model to understand the distinction between A and B. The transformer models should be able to handle a variety of data — audio, image and video. There could be billions of correlations between these kinds of data. The more we understand it, the more fascinating it will be.

Thus the multi-modal systems is the next frontier of knowledge. However, it is an expensive proposition. Facebook’s Llama has been trained on 16000 Nvidia A100 GPUs. You can imagine the hardware requirements of the future models.

Currently, GPU technology is the gold standard for AI but the future chips may not be called GPUs. They would be just neutral, deep learning accelerators.

LeCun has his misgivings even about quantum computing. He still believes that classical computing is enough to solve the problems efficiently. Useful quantum computing has got a long time horizon.

AI, however, a decade back, was considered to be a commercializable technology.