Yan LeCun, Facebook’s AI chief and considered to be one of the godfathers of AI reacted to Elon Musk’s contention that AI will supersede human intelligence in the next five years. The world has seen ChatGPT (2022), AI chatbots of Google and Microsoft. AI has been progressing and one idea that emerges every now and then is AI surpassing human intelligence and then taking control of the world. LeCun counters this idea by saying that if this is so, then the AI systems could have learnt driving cars with 20 hours of practice, just as the teenagers do. However, we are far away from a fully autonomous car though we have millions of hours labelled training data. As for AI taking over the world, the idea is ridiculous.

AI may pose an existential threat. This concept is based on the assumption of a hard take off. This theory means, the moment a super-intelligent system is turned on, it will improve upon itself on its own, and be more intelligent than humans, ultimately leading to the destruction of the whole world. This is a joke, since no process in the world is exponential for very long. Such systems would have to recruit all the resources of the world. And infinite power.