Meta's AI chief: LLMs will never reach human-level intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Meta's AI chief: LLMs will never reach human-level intelligence

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49 pointsalex_young33 comments

The title and opening is perhaps giving people reason to infer something which Lecun isn’t arguing, that AI isn’t going to reach such a level of intelligence. Indeed, he’s published on the topic of Autonomous/Augmented Machine Intelligence [1] and while a subtle difference between that and AGI, it’s not negating the possibility. Just perhaps not through existing LLM architectures

[1] https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

It also invites the mistaken judgement that LLM-derived architecture cannot possibly give human level reasoning.

"No matter what you do to an LLM it's still a stochastic parrot."

Adding memory? Nope.

Interactive hypothesis testing and iterative experiments? Sounds like something a parrot would say.

It can automatically solve 12% of GitHub issues? Pfft, I could theoretically do 100%. If I wasn't incredibly busy...

It's okay though. At this point, when someone cites Lecun to prove LLMs can never reason, we can safely assume they don't care about having an informed opinion. It's a screening signal. It tells us someone does not have a useful theory of mind and reasoning, and does not intend to do constructive work on AI systems that can reason.

That's like saying cars will never reach human level locomotion. Sure, they can't climb ladders but it's a whole new universe, and so is intelligence

I am still glad they exist. If this thinking was very prevalent among AI pioneers (which it probably was for companies like Meta and Google, that's why failed to innovate here), we wouldn't have gotten revolutionary products like ChatGPT.

For me the fundamental question remains if it's a matter of the right input data (beyond language) or is there something about our brains that cannot be replicated by artificial neural architectures for it to discover new knowledge and invent new things for humankind.

Anyone in the field kind of knew this, unless they’re a hype grifter. But who knows what transformers v2, v3, and beyond will look like. They better be a big leap though, because big tech has big pockets, but not infinite ones. And it’s really hard to iterate if each experiment costs 10 million dollars.

There's enough hype grifters around that I think, especially as AI becomes more relevant to the mainstream and people are making investment decisions based on a company's AI future, there's def value in a big name person in the field coming out to provide some clarity.

> LLMs will never reach human-level intelligence

For most values of human

> “Most of human knowledge is actually not language so those systems can never reach human-level intelligence — unless you change the architecture,” LeCun said.

... Is his point that LLMs will not reach human level intelligence because they're limited to text, but other approaches like Sora might, because they work on video?

If so, this is a rather shallow point.

No, one of his other interviews he delved a bit more into it with examples, things like puzzles and quizzes like start at the North Pole, move south 1km, left 2km and up 1km. Where are you and how did you work that out? His point was there's spatial reasoning among other things happening. It's not purely a vision thing, or a language thing. There's a deeper world understanding there than just language can convey. He raised some similar points about image and video generation how they failed to produce meaningful results with a similar approach. I think it was his latest lex fridman interview. Was pretty interesting. Definitely raised some strong points.

The argument is that random tezxr is not intelligence.

And the word random here.id exactly precariously intetwondd with both probablistic and coincidwntal

Long-standing Capabilities denier denies current capabilities.

Like saying robots will never reach human-level dexterity. Might be true, but so what? AIs and robots will significantly advance what’s possible and in unpredictable ways, just like any technology in the last 30 years.

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