Even as a host of companies seem to be marching towards AGI, there seems to be no love lost between some of them.
Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun has said that Dario Amodei, the CEO of rival AI company Anthropic, is “deluded” about the dangers of AI. He also hinted that Amodei has a “huge superiority complex”.
LeCun had made a post on Threads implying that AI concerns were overblown. He shared a snippet of a made-up bit of AI code that was explicitly designed to say “I don’t want to shut down” when it was asked to shut down, hinting that many of the current safety concerns around AI systems becoming sentient were being caused that they were, in a way, being programmed into these systems. Anthropic, in particular, has been highlighting many such concerns, including revealing that one of its AI systems threatened to reveal an engineer’s affair when it was told it was being shut down, and another instance when its models had begun speaking Sanskrit when they’d been asked to talk to one another.
This prompted a commentor on threads to ask him what he thought of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “Is Anthropic CEO an AI doomer? AI hyper? Both?” the commentor asked.
“He is a doomer, but he keeps working on “AGI”,’ LeCun replied. “This means one of two things: 1. He is intellectually dishonest and/or morally corrupt. 2. He has a huge superiority complex, thinking only he is enlightened enough to have access to AI, but the unwashed masses are too stupid or immoral to use such a powerful tool. In reality, he is deluded about the dangers and power of current AI systems,” he added.
This isn’t the first time that Yann LeCun has taken potshots at Dario Amodei. A few months ago, he’d said that the idea of having a country of geniuses in a datacenter — which was introduced by Dario Amodei — was “complete BS”. “We are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs,” he had said. “And and whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues, it’s not going to happen within the next two years. This absolutely no way in hell. The idea that we were going to have, you know, a country of geniuses in the data center — that’s completely BS. That’s absolutely no way,” he had said. And with LeCun now explicitly saying that Dario Amodei was delusional about AI safety, he seems to be hinting that Anthropic’s focus on AI risk might not be completely warranted at the moment.