Yann LeCun, the godfather of AI, has said that AI won’t affect jobs forever and that it will not kill jobs of writers, but those below par. LeCun, a French-American professor of computer science and machine learning and Vise President and Chief AI Scientist of Meta, also pointed out that the ones impacted negatively will be the students who cheat, journalists who reproduce press releases rather than doing their own research, and lazy professors.
He is of the idea that human like and authentic story telling with creative input does not need to feel threatened by AI, as this is the very substance of every significant piece of work. LeCun thinks that what AI will replace are only the jobs of repetitive tasks, and the fields that require complex decisions, social sense, and creativity are not going to be replaced any time soon.
LeCun thinks that fear mongers of any type are just attention seekers, and despite the fact that machines will eventually outperform humans but we are far from that, and the ones predicting that AI will take over the world must realize that AI yet has to gain cognitive intelligence as little as a rat. And of course, a rat can’t overtake our world, and if it tries to, we know that any AI model is operating from a datacenter, and there must be an off switch for it.
Creative jobs not going anywhere.
As it has been a common perception that AI has the potential to replace many types of jobs, for this reason, quite a number of companies have stopped hiring for certain positions. But, Prof. LeCun thinks, that AI will not push many people out of their jobs forever. He thinks that the nature of work and the way we do our work will change, as it is difficult to assume what job roles will be in demand after 20 years.
Yann LeCun says that we humans will have to go through a transition as a workforce, as we did when the printing press was invented or when the internet came into our hands. He thinks that the jobs of data entry, financial analysis, and customer service will reduce as the reduced costs and efficiency of AI will play a deciding role. But he thinks that the jobs of teachers, therapists, lawyers, athletes, and artists are going to stay. Meta’s chief scientist feels that businesses and governments must invest in training their staff so that they can adapt to the changing work conditions which are changing.
Yann LeCun not bullish on AGI
Yann LeCun has his own theory of AI, which is often contradictory to popular beliefs. He has opposed the industry leaders on many occasions. He doesn’t think of AI as something that will take over our world, he thinks of it as a human projection on machines. In his opinion, AI research should not be kept under lock, as it will be a mistake.
Previously, LeCun opposed Elon Musk’s idea of AGI to outsmart humanity by the year 2025. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, also predicted that AGI could be here in five years. But LeCun does not seem that bullish on AGI, he denies that there still is anything called AGI. But why? —- LeCun’s argument is that human intelligence is not general in its core. But according to LeCun, that is still a distant target. The fundamental traits of human intelligence are understanding the physical world around, reasoning, planning, and persistent memory. Animals also possess these very traits.
LeCun says that we are still far from even human level intelligence, let alone surpassing it. According to him, a four year old has seen fifty times more data than the biggest LLMs have ever seen. As we human don’t learn from language alone; we learn from our surroundings and the world around us. For this, we need to change the architecture of the LLMs training and we have to include other parameters other than just feeding text in order to make them capable, at least to the level of a cat, who has much more cognitive power than the smartest LLM available.
