Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13 · primary
Themes: Safety Debate
The claim that advanced AI poses a catastrophic risk is overblown, and the fear does more damage than the technology.
Now, future systems are a different story. So maybe once we get a powerful system that is super-smart, they're going to help science, they're going to help medicine, they're going to help business, they're going to erase cultural barriers by allowing simultaneous translation. So there's a lot of benefits. So there's a risk-benefit analysis, which is: is it productive to try to keep the technology under wraps, in the hope that the bad guys won't get their hands on it?
Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13
The point is, AI systems, as smart as they might be, will be subservient to us. We set their goals, and they don't have any intrinsic goal that we would build into them to dominate. It would be really stupid to build that. It would also be useless. Nobody would buy it anyway.
Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13
There's a lot of things that are said about this that are basically complete fantasy. There's actually a report that was just published by the RAND Corporation where they studied, with current systems, how much easier does it make [it] for badly-intentioned people to come up with recipes for bioweapons? And the answer is: it doesn't. The reason is because current systems are really not that smart. They're trained on public data. So basically, they can't invent new things.
Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13
Open models keep AI continually available, rather than dependent on any one provider's decisions.
**Let's talk about open source. You have been a big advocate of open research in your career, and Meta has adopted a policy of effectively open-sourcing its most powerful large language models, most recently Llama 2. This strategy sets Meta apart from Google and Microsoft, which do not release the so-called weights of their most powerful systems. Do you think that Meta's approach will continue to be appropriate as its AIs become more and more powerful, even approaching human-level intelligence?**
Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13
The first-order answer is yes. And the reason for it is, in the future, everyone's interaction with the digital world, and the world of knowledge more generally, is going to be mediated by AI systems. They're going to be basically playing the role of human assistants who will be with us at all times. We're not going to be using search engines. We're just going to be asking questions to our assistants, and it's going to help us in our daily life. So our entire information diet is going to be mediated by these systems. They will constitute the repository of all human knowledge.
Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13
They're not going to do this for a proprietary system. So the future has to be open source, if nothing else, for reasons of cultural diversity, democracy, diversity. We need a diverse AI assistant for the same reason we need a diverse press.
Yann LeCun on AGI, Open-Source, and AI Risk — TIME Interview Full Text · 2024-02-13
Open weights prevent AI from being controlled by a few actors, because anyone can run them.
Releasing model weights raises the risk of catastrophic misuse, because guardrails cannot be applied and usage cannot be monitored once the weights are out.
A coordinated slowdown is worth pursuing even at the cost of advantage, because uncoordinated speed is the greater risk.
Safety and innovation trade off against one another: what makes a model safer makes it less capable or less widely available, so pushing on one goal costs ground on the other.
Building national AI capacity on sovereign infrastructure is sound policy for smaller countries, not merely a way to sell deployments.
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