Artificial intelligence has witnessed several waves of technology. The chief scientist of AI, Facebook, LeCun was fascinated by intelligence in animals and humans right from his young age. Later, he worked on neural nets. While accepting Facebook assignment, he insisted on working on open-source models. He also insisted that he would be New York-based and would teach at NYU. He considered that open source makes AI democratic enough for the next wave. He remembers Minsky who talked about the perceptron in the 1950s. He refers to the work of Piaget and Chomsky in linguistics. He is aware of the limitations of data and learning models of the 1980s. Minsky and others felt that it was time to pause AI research (AI winter). The slump in AI research lasted for many years.
LeCun is not fond of the term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He prefers the term AMI or advanced machine intelligence. There is no linear scale of intelligence, say a cat smarter than a human being or vice versa. Some gadgets can beat an intelligent human being in some games, say chess. AGI is not going to be an event. It is a progressive thing.
AI will be smarter in human ways in long term. However, there is no single tipping point.
LeCun is of the opinion that generative AI could be replaced by Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). GenAI has a short shelf-life.
He mentions PyTorch as the vehicle for ChatGPT and other technologies. He feels that self-supervised learning is probably the most revolutionary concept that completely changed the way we practise ML. In future, our interactions with the digital world will be mediated by AI assistants.
Printing press was the last invention that accelerated dissemination of knowledge and philosophy. It led to American revolution, the French revolution and emergence of democracy. AI could have such a profound impact, and will bring about a new renaissance.
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