Meta's artificial intelligence boss said the big language models that power generative AI products like ChatGPT won’t ever achieve the flexibility to think and plan like humans, as he as a substitute focuses on a radically alternative approach to creating “superintelligence” in Machines focused.
Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist on the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, said LLMs have “a really limited understanding of logic.” . . They don’t understand the physical world, don’t have any everlasting memory, cannot define the concept rationally, and can’t plan. . . hierarchical”.
In an interview with the Financial Times, he argued against counting on the advancement of LLMs within the seek for human intelligence, as these models can only respond appropriately to prompts in the event that they have been fed the proper training data, and subsequently are “inherently unsafe”.
Instead, he’s working on developing a wholly recent generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human intelligence, although he said it could take 10 years for that vision to be realized.
Meta has poured billions of dollars into developing its own LLMs as generative AI has exploded, aiming to meet up with rival tech giants including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet's Google.
LeCun leads a team of around 500 people within the Meta Fundamental AI Research (Fair) laboratory. They are working to develop an AI that develops common sense and learns how the world works – much like humans. This approach known as “world modeling.”
The Meta AI boss's experimental vision is a potentially dangerous and dear enterprise for the social media group at a time when investors are hoping for quick returns on AI investments.
Last month, Meta lost nearly $200 billion in value as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg vowed to extend spending and make the social media company the “leading AI company on this planet.”
“We’re at the purpose where we imagine we’re on the cusp of perhaps the following generation of AI systems,” LeCun said.
LeCun's comments come as Meta and its competitors proceed to push improved LLMs. Figures like OpenAI boss Sam Altman imagine they represent an important step toward creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) – the purpose at which machines have greater cognitive abilities than humans.
OpenAI released its recent, faster GPT-4o model last week and Google unveiled a brand new “multimodal” artificial intelligence agent that may answer real-time queries about video, audio and text. It's called Project Astra and is predicated on an updated version of its Gemini model.
Meta also launched its recent Llama 3 model last month. The company's head of worldwide affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, said its latest LLM had “significantly improved skills akin to reasoning” – the flexibility to use logic to queries. For example, the system would suspect that an individual affected by a headache, sore throat, and runny nose has a chilly, but could also detect that allergies may very well be causing the symptoms.
However, LeCun said this development of LLMs is superficial and limited since the models only learn when human engineers intervene to coach them on that information, somewhat than the AI coming to a conclusion organically like humans do.
“It actually looks as if a reasoning to most individuals – but more often than not it's about exploiting collected knowledge from numerous training data,” LeCun said, but added, “(LLMs) are very useful despite their limitations.”
Google DeepMind has also been exploring alternative methods of constructing artificial intelligence (AI) for several years, including methods akin to reinforcement learning, during which AI agents learn from their surroundings in a game-like virtual environment.
At an event in London on Tuesday, DeepMind boss Sir Demis Hassabis said what the language models lack is that they “don't understand the spatial context you're in… which ultimately limits their usefulness.”
Meta arrange its Fair lab in 2013 to pioneer AI research and hired leading scientists in the sector.
However, in early 2023, Meta formed a brand new GenAI team led by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. It poached many AI researchers and engineers from Fair, led work on Llama 3, and integrated it into products akin to its recent AI assistants and image generation tools.
The creation of the GenAI team got here as some insiders argued that an educational culture inside the Fair lab was partly chargeable for Meta's late entry into the generative AI boom. Zuckerberg has pushed for more industrial applications of AI under pressure from investors.
However, in line with people near the corporate, LeCun stays certainly one of Zuckerberg's top advisors, as he’s often called certainly one of the founding fathers of AI and won a Turing Award for his work on neural networks.
“We refocused Fair on the longer-term goal of human-level AI, essentially because GenAI is now focused on the things we now have a transparent path to,” LeCun said.
“(Achieving AGI) will not be a product design problem, it's not even a technology development problem, it's more of a science problem,” he added.
LeCun first published a paper on his world modeling vision in 2022, and Meta has since published two research models based on this approach.
Today, he said, Fair is testing different ideas for achieving human-level intelligence because “there's numerous uncertainty and numerous research to be done, so we are able to't predict which ones will likely be successful or ultimately prevail.”
Among other things, LeCun's team feeds systems hours of video and deliberately omits frames to then get the AI to predict what is going to occur next. This is meant to emulate how children learn by passively observing the world around them.
He also said Fair is looking into constructing a “universal text coding system” that may allow a system to process abstract representations of data in texts that may then be applied to video and audio.
Some experts doubt that LeCun's vision is possible.
Aron Culotta, an associate professor of computer science at Tulane University, said common sense has long been a “thorn within the side” of AI and that teaching models causality is difficult, making them “vulnerable to those unexpected errors.”
A former Meta AI worker described the worldwide modeling push as a “vague ambiguity,” adding, “It looks like there’s numerous flag-raising happening.”
Another current worker said Fair has yet to prove itself as an actual rival to research groups like DeepMind.
Longer term, LeCun believes the technology will power AI agents that users can interact with through wearable technologies, including augmented reality or “smart” glasses and electromyography (EMG) “bracelets.”
“(For AI agents) to be truly useful, they should have intelligence much like human levels,” he said.
