While most Americans fired up their grills and enjoyed a chilly beer on Memorial Day weekend, Yann LeCunMeta’s chief AI scientist, and Elon Muskthe mysterious CEO of Tesla and xAI, were engaged in a merciless digital slugfest on X.com (formerly Twitter). This clash of AI titans exposed a few of crucial fault lines within the fast-moving, hype-driven field of artificial intelligence.
The online dispute erupted on Sunday, May 26, when LeCun sharply criticized Musk, who was promoting job openings at his recent AI startup xAI. LeCun's tweet was a masterpiece of snarky language: “Come to xAI when you can stand a boss who claims what you're working on shall be solved next 12 months (no pressure), claims what you're working on goes to kill everyone and desires to be stopped or paused (yay, 6 months vacation!), claims to need a 'maximum conscientious seek for truth' but spreads crazy conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”
Musk, never one to back down from a fight, hit back. “What 'science' have you ever been doing for the past 5 years?” he posted, questioning LeCun's recent contributions in the sphere. LeCun wasn't going to let it go: “Over 80 technical papers have been published since January 2022. And you?”
The Godfather of Convolutional Neural Networks vs. The Self-Proclaimed Savior of Humanity
LeCun, 63, is a real AI legend, one in every of the pioneers of deep learning, the groundbreaking technology that now powers all the things from chatbots to self-driving cars. As a researcher at Bell Labs in 1989, he co-authored a paper that Convolutional neural networksa fundamental architecture of deep learning. “Every single driver assistance system today uses ConvNets,” wrote LeCun, and he's not mistaken.
Musk's 52-year relationship with the AI ​​research community has been reasonably turbulent, despite his firms' heavy reliance on the technology. His startup, xAI, has the noble goal of developing human-level artificial intelligence – a goal many experts consider premature. Tesla's self-driving automotive technology, which Musk has repeatedly touted as being near full autonomy, relies heavily on deep learning systems originally developed in academic labs like LeCun's.
The importance of sharing scientific knowledge within the age of corporate secrecy
“Technological marvels don't just fall out of thin air,” LeCun wrote. “They are based on years (sometimes a long time) of scientific research that make them possible. Research ideas and results are shared in technical documents. Without this sharing of scientific information, technological progress can be slow.”
In typical Musk fashion, Musk dismissed the importance of scientific publications and claimed that Tesla hardly uses convolutional neural networks in its autonomous driving stack anymore. LeCun was not convinced: “To be honest, I'm curious how you may understand camera images in real time without ConvNets (fully autonomous driving).”
At a time when corporate secrecy around AI development is becoming the norm, as evidenced by the tight-lipped labs of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, many experts still imagine that timely and transparent scientific publications are essential to the long-term health of the sphere. Clem Delangue, co-founder of AI startup Hugging Face, put it succinctly: “The scientists who openly publish their groundbreaking research are the cornerstone of technological progress and contribute massively to creating the world a greater place!”
The way forward for AI: A tale of two visions
Both Meta and xAI have had eventful years on their path to AI dominance. Meta recently released a big language model called LLaMA 3 and is Integrating similar technologies into its social apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, while at the identical time Market value is decliningMeanwhile, xAI has announced a whopping $6 billion fundraise, while Musk guarantees to develop an “artificial general intelligence,” although the small print of his master plan remain vague at best.
LeCun and Musk, two of probably the most influential figures in artificial intelligence, clearly have different visions for the long run of this groundbreaking technology. But if this holiday weekend is any indication, the debates that can shape that future are increasingly being played out within the open, one tweet at a time. And we're definitely there. Pass me the popcorn.
