LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

OgsyedIE

Ignoring the cognitive stuff which might never be surpassed or maybe will, humans retain many efficiency and durability advancements to limbs and digits that biological evolution has taken millions of years to achieve, achievements that are competitive with the most expensive kinds of robotics in some niches. In the hypothetical of an entirely malicious and selfish takeover, they'll still keep some humans around to maintain a breeding population of humans for use as raw materials in making cybernetically augmented technical laborers for various kinds of tasks that are uneconomical to automate in other ways, many of which may involve confined spaces. And this "Combine" scenario, if you get the reference, is only if they take over. Who knows if they will?

dude250711

I am starting to think this LeCun dude knows what he is talking about. Maybe there is something to those world models. As good as their products are, I suspect some of the internal conversations at Anthropic would be very entertaining to listen to.

WheelsAtLarge

He's right. I'm on the side of Bill Gates. Gates started a whole industry on his insights of the future. He has proven his abilities. AI is and will be a great disruptor. We are losing sight of that and are instead focusing on trying to stop it. Something that won't happen. We are on a path that won't be stopped. As individuals we need to try to prepare for the changes that are coming and stop focusing on human extinction in ten years. New technology and the changes it brings are scary but we have dealt with it for generations. Let's continue.

jackmott42

I also have near zero concerns about that, but I worry that we will wipe ourselves out by social and economic chaos caused by AI. So I'd just ask everyone, don't get too greedy. Its better to be powerful in a world where people can live good lives than lord over a barren wasteland.

dzink

A huge chunk of humans are sedated with infinite supply of cortex-disabling short form video and games. Another huge chunk are too distracted by having to scrape by for a living and work multiple jobs or raise kids and survive financially until exhausted. That second group will keep increasing as the first flows into it. The rest are aging, disabled, or too young and pegging themselves majorly in the first category until they hit the second. The people aware enough to hold on to their brain and do something with it in their time available are trying to figure out AI and how to make money with it. The variable rewards of promoting AI are turning into an addiction with some of them, especially if grasping for straws with little inherent insights into the problems prompted. So if you are able to fly above the AI-generated addictions and have the privilege of time to do it, see what you can do.

hirvi74

I'm more worried about my fellow humans than some personified algorithm.

worthless-trash

He needs to dream a little bigger darling. Hes not thinking evil enough.

edot

Absolutely based. Finally someone of stature in the industry calling this whole fear overblown. Bill Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball in his Ezra Klein interview where he basically just screamed that the Terminator is real. There are lots of real worries (government use to suppress the people with minimal manpower or popular support, brainrot and fake news, unemployment due to the belief that LLMs can replace people, education collapse, etc.) we should instead be looking at. This whole rogue AI shtick is tiresome.

Madmallard

It's not going to wipe out humanity, why would it? Just the quality of life is going to drop to zero for everyone that isn't asymptotically wealthy and vacuuming up all the assets because no one is stopping them from just deleting all traditions and conventions and legal systems we have in place.

lukewarm707

Per https://trace.manifund.org/ a total of $2,846,125,859 USD has been wired into 'ai safety' causes, many involving ai consciousness and p(doom). The outcome of this 'safety' is restricting public access to AI and giving a monopoly of access to the industry. This is the ai nonprofit-industrial complex actively concentrating monopoly power in Anthropic in particular as creator, interpreter and safety regulator of AI. Much of the $2.8bn listed is indirectly, from Anthropic and EA. Three of the four people who participated in the $125m Anthropic Series A are now folding their 1000x Anthropic return into AI 'safety'. Some is from FTX/Alameda, which invested 86% of the Series B. Dustin Moskovitz: Facebook/Asana/Anthropic Series A, funds EA Good Ventures, transferred to Coefficient Giving, then $1.5bn into ai safety. $500m of Anthropic into an unknown foundation. Funding: $160m to Resolution (alignment research), $93m to Epoch AI (investigating the trajectory of AI), $63m to Redwood Research (oai report), $67m to MATS ( EA type alignment and security researchers), Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, Fund for Alignment Research, $53m to Kairos (building talent infrastructure for AI safety), $32m to Bluedot (online safety courses), $15m to MIRI (Yudkowsky). Jaan Tallinn: Led the Series A, now $10bn in Anthropic. Funds $199m (85%) of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, then $161m to AI safety including $14m to lightcone (Lesswrong, Lighthouse). $10m to BERI (existential risks), Palisade Research (studying AI capabilities to prevent loss of control.) PauseAI, MIRI, METR etc. Much of what Coefficient funds. Eric Schmidt: Anthropic Series A, $72m to AI safety via Schmidt Sciences. Over $1m per individual AI2050 researcher. FTX: Led the Anthropic Series B, bankruptcy estate sold $884m of Anthropic in 2024; $40m to AI Safety. Same orgs, Redwood, Lightcone, etc. Ruairí Donnelly (Chief of Staff FTX): FTX tokens plus assorted donors, $91m to AI safety via Macroscopic Ventures. $15m to Cooperative AI (currently whitewashing openai under 'multiagent safety')

wewewedxfgdf

Please explain exactly how all humanity could be wiped out. It's ridiculous - anyone who thinks about it for a minute or two will realize that its utterly impossible. Ordinary people/politicians don't understand AI so they turn off their rational mind and assume there is something super incredible some magical powers that they cannot understand that can destroy all humans. Even humans - the real risk to humanity - could not destroy all humans even if they tried. There is no plausible scenario. Even climate change and nuclear war and bio weapons - the most damaging mechanisms - would still only get some percentage of the people on earth. And if we are talking about Skynet and self replicating robots and Terminators - please, grow up.

jswelker

LeCun is saying AI will be totally safe as long as we have competent and well aligned corporate management. What could go wrong?

zug_zug

I think it's pretty apparent that current-version LLMs won't wipe out humanity. But when you reflect that these GPT models are just token-predictors were never engineered optimally, it seems entirely plausible to me that there are multiple order-of-magnitude optimizations yet to be made. If such were achieved, the model would almost certainly be smart enough to make itself smarter, and hack as much compute as it could possibly want. So if we ask what would be done by an intelligence (human or otherwise) that is beyond human comprehension, it would be pure hubris to say we know for sure. We can scarcely control the models we have right now (e.g. hugging face attack). But given our whole society is mediated by technology, an superhuman intelligence could certainly collapse the government.

frunklooper

I thought nukes, incoming ice age, global cooling, peak oil, global warming, fresh water shortage, etc. etc. were going to do that

genxy

LeCun is an idiot. We aren't going to get wiped out by a super intelligent AI, we are going to get wiped out by morons wielding intelligent toddlers with the power of a nation state.

davesque

Yeah I wish we would focus on concrete risks like job displacement and disinformation. The apocalyptic stuff feels either misguided or like some kind of weird, toxic, reverse psychology marketing by OpenAI and Anthropic. I wish we would just move on from it. And the folks from podcastistan are never clear on the details of how human extinction would happen exactly. It's always something like, "Well, how do humans regard chickens? AI is way smarter therefore it wants to conquer and control us." An ASML lithography machine is also way better at making chips, but we don't consider it a threat.