Yann LeCun: 'zero concerns' on AI, Amodei 'deluded'

LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for deep learning, the neural network technology underpinning today's AI boom. Nearly a decade later, he is the only one of the three AI 'godfathers' who is not deeply concerned about AI risks, and he argues the warnings from leading AI executives are misguided and counterproductive.

His targets include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose warnings he calls destructive and 'the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine.' LeCun links those warnings to effective altruism, the philosophical movement he calls 'super toxic' and a 'complete disaster,' and sees them as a push for regulatory capture that would entrench dominant companies. He is also aligned with the Trump administration on AI fears, though he condemns its research budget cuts — Trump signed an executive order renaming AI 'super intelligence.'

AMI Labs, which LeCun founded after leaving Meta after 12 years, is his vehicle for proving world models can eventually supersede large language models. Whether that bet pays off hinges on whether the company's first product, debuting 'soon,' can show world models working in industrial settings, and on whether LeCun's confidence in human oversight over AI danger holds up.