Who Wants to Control AI? One Man Has Answer
Is the entire AI doom-and-gloom day drama fake?
Yann LeCun, one of the men considered to be the godfathers of AI,
thinks that the AI doomsday scenarios, which are being floated time and
again, are exaggerated.
Commenting on the
apparent obsession of some entrepreneurs with the possible end of the
world, – due to nuclear war or an AI malfunction/uprising – he says that
the motive of their actions isn’t really that benevolent.
He
believes that some use them are simply trying to conceal a far more
primitive desire of taking the reins of the process – a notion he
clarified in a lengthy tweet on X (Twitter).
In
it, he mentioned three “suspects”: ex-CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, CEO of
DeepMind Technologies Demis Hassabis, and CEO and Co-Founder of
Anthropic Dario Amodei, accusing them of doing “massive corporate
lobbying at the moment”, adding that they are the ones “attempting to
perform a regulatory capture of the AI industry.”
In
his rant-like tweet, LeCun added, “the vast majority of our academic
colleagues are massively in favor of open AI R&D. Very few believe
in the doomsday scenarios you have promoted.”
He reiterated his stance in another tweet where he touched upon people assimilating the risks associated with pandemics with the risks associated with AI progress.
According to him, the pandemic is a natural development. Meanwhile, AI progress is not a natural phenomenon.
“*We*
propel it forward. We have agency. We can choose to develop it or not.
We can strive to develop beneficial forms of it. And we can choose to
deploy it only if it is beneficial,” he said.
He
also quoted a tweet by Elon Musk where he mocked the attendees of the
AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in the UK. While Musk himself
recently confirmed that AI is capable of killing humankind, it seems
like in reality he has little reservations as to what he’s doing.
Especially since he just launched his fresh product the Grok chatbot.
