As we already know, three AI scientists won the Turing Prize in 2019 — they were Geoffrey Hinton, Yaan Lecun and Bengio. The prize was given for their outstanding work in the areas of deep learning and neural networks.

Despite their collaboration, Bengio and Lecun hold different opinions on AI’s potential risks,

In October 2023, there was a debate about the potential risks of AI between Yann Lecun and Youshua Bengio. As we know Lecun is Facebook’s chief AI scientist. He rolled out the debate on his Facebook page addressing the silent majority of AI scientists to express their opinions about the reliability of AI. It gave rise to a lively discussion, eliciting comments from respected AI community.

Bengio from University of Montreal answered to Lecun’s post. He did not agree with Lecun’s perspective on AI safety. He advised prudence in designing AI systems. He was not in favour of open source AI systems. He compared them to the distribution of dangerous weapons freely.

Lecun focused on safe systems but advised avoiding the catastrophic scenarios. He feels there is enough funding to make AI safe and reliable. He does not agree with the comparison of open AI systems with the free distribution of dangerous weapons. He feels AI is to enhance human intelligence. It does not intend to cause any harm.

Eisner from Microsoft also contributed to the debate. He supported the weaponry analogy of Bengio. It was agreed that though there cannot be zero risk situation, the access could be restricted to minimize the harms.

AI debate has not remained restricted to academicians. It has invited attention of the thinkers and policy makers. With the fast advancing field of AI, there is a need for fruitful debate about the implications of AI.