Meta’s AI chief says that artificial intelligence is not the apocalypse: They are dumber than cats

We have all read that Artificial Intelligence will reach a point where it will get rid of us, as it will realize that humans are a danger to Earth and the future of our planet. Deep down, it wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

However, Yann LeCun, chief researcher at Meta and one of the so-called Godfathers of AI, believes that such claims are “complete nonsense.”

LeCun is one of the industry experts who believes that the catastrophic rumors about AI are exaggerated. Last year, he described warnings that the technology was a threat to humanity as “ridiculous,” and he reiterated his words to the Wall Street Journal last week.

“You’ll have to excuse me, but that’s complete nonsense,” he stated to the newspaper, when asked if AI would become intelligent enough to pose a threat to humanity.

Cats “have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning. None of these qualities are present in today’s ‘frontier’ AIs.”—@ylecun⁩
“This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat” @WSJ⁩ https://t.co/1xdbtVKDAu

— Christopher Manning (@chrmanning) October 13, 2024

AI is dumber than a cat and this is how Yann LeCun explains it

Unlike those in the sector who believe that General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) will be the next step in the generative AI revolution, LeCun asserts that current LLMs will not lead to a system that matches or surpasses human capabilities in a wide range of cognitive tasks.

The New York University professor claims that LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok lack persistent memory, reasoning, planning, and understanding of the physical world. He added that LLMs demonstrate that “language can be manipulated without being intelligent,” and that they will never lead to true AGI.

Yann LeCun tells PhD students there is no point working on LLMs because they are only an off-ramp on the highway to ultimate intelligence pic.twitter.com/01BUWb1p3T

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) June 1, 2024

LeCun explained to the newspaper that LLMs are not as smart as a domestic cat, but they are very good at predicting the next word in the text they generate, which is what leads people to think they are really “smart” or even intelligent.

LeCun is not entirely against the idea of an AGI, he just believes it will not come through more advanced LLMs, but from a different AI.

LeCun, Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio earned the nickname Godfathers of AI in 2019 after winning the Turing Award. Hinton left his job at Google in 2023, warning that as companies exploit more powerful AI systems, they become increasingly dangerous.