Will AI become so powerful that it threatens us? Chief Meta scientist: "Pardon my French but that's complete B.S." This is the attitude that I would expect of any company with such a stake in the AI game

AI is a worrying subject. From the possibility of LLMs misinforming the public through chatbots, or generative AI posing an imminent threat to the careers of many great artists, to Skynet taking control and conquering the human race. One of these is less likely than the other, but it's still something that many are discussing. A chief AI scientist from Meta believes we have nothing to fear.

In a recent report for The Wall Street Journal Yann LeCun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, was asked if people should be worried about the future of AI. He replied: "You will have to forgive my French, but this is complete B.S."

LeCun's resume is impressive in AI. He won a Turing Award for his work on deep learning in 2018. Since then, he has been proclaimed one of the "godfathers" of AI as was noted in the original report. He has a lot of experience in this field.

He told the reporter that AI was dumber than cats, and this mimics the recent report by Apple scientists about the limitations of LLMs. This report suggests LLMs cannot reason like humans, and shows "a critical flaw in LLMs ability to genuinely comprehend mathematical concepts and discern pertinent information for problem solving."

LeCun has not been shy about publicly dissuading fear and anger around AI. LeCun had a spat in May of this year with Elon Musk. LeCun doubted Musk not only about his promises regarding xAI, but also about Musk's politics. Musk asked Lecun to prove his credentials. Lecun responded by presenting 80 technical papers that he had published in the past two years. Musk replied, "That's nothing. You're going too soft." Try harder! ".

Musk's arrogance is what led to LeCun's support, as can be seen in his original tweets.

Meta has been exploring AI, and users have expressed their distrust by sending "Goodbye Meta AI", chain mail. Meta is currently involved with many types of AI, so comparing it to humans may miss some of the arguments that people make against it.

It's important that users don't base their concerns about AI on the fear of Skynet or AI surpassing human intellect. The fear is largely cultural, political and legal. It doesn't matter how good or poor AI is from a technical standpoint if it replaces the human art and creativity. And it doesn't have to be smarter that a housecat in order to do this.

Hey, even your housecat can knock off your computer from your desk.