Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei had brought up the evocative idea of how AI could build a “country of geniuses in a datacenter,” but not all people in the field are on board.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and a Turing Award winner, recently offered a starkly contrasting perspective. Known for his blunt and often humorous style, LeCun didn’t mince words when addressing the notion of achieving human-level AI in the near future, or Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s concept of a “country of geniuses” emerging from current AI development.
“We are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling up LLMs,” LeCun stated categorically. “And this is just not going to happen. There’s no way, okay, absolutely no way,” he said.
LeCun then seemed to take a swipe at many AI leaders who were proclaiming incredible AI capabilities in the years ahead, largely through scaling up LLMs. “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,” he added. “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 said.
LeCun then laid out his own vision of near-future AI capabilities: “What we’re going to have, maybe, is systems that are trained on sufficiently large amounts of data that any question that any reasonable person may ask will will find an answer through the systems. And you would feel like you have, you know, a PhD next to you. But it’s not a PhD you have next to you, it’s a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability. Not a system that can invent solutions to new problems,” he said.
LeCun has long been saying that scaling LLMs will not lead to human-like AI. He’s said that text data alone cannot produce human-like understanding, and has even said that he’s no longer interested in LLMs for creating human-like AI. Other AI leaders, on the other hand, have been building up the potential of AI. “At some point, we’re going to get to AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks. The term I’ve used for it, an essay I recently wrote is a country of geniuses in the data center,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had recently said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman too has also been saying that there’s no wall to AI progress. Yann LeCun, though, is a prominent voice who seems to strongly disagree, and believes that it’ll take some technical and architectural breakthroughs to keep growing AI at the pace at which it’s growing right now. It remains to be seen how things play out, but even in the very top echelons of AI, there’s plenty of disagreement on how the future of the field — and indeed, of humanity — will unfold.