‘Godfather of AI’ explains why today’s artificial intelligence ‘sucks’ – and why Elon Musk is wrong

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, is one of the three men sometimes called the godfather of artificial intelligence. But really when we compare the abilities of our machines to what animals and humans can do, they don’t stack up.” Animals are able to learn quickly, find out what works and acquire human sense in a way that AI could only dream of, he said – “and I’m not talking about particularly smart animals”. open image in gallery Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist said that humans and animals can still outsmart the most advanced machine learning LeCun is much less optimistic. Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, warned about the danger of the technology being kept in the “clammy hands” of a “small number of very, very large, well-heeled companies in California”. “They want to join in this new technology, they want to participate; they don’t have tens of billions of dollars to build new AI data centres and run the training models in the way that some of the leading particularly American and Chinese tech companies do – but they do have the ingenuity.” The key to allowing that kind of democratic access will be in open source, Meta has argued – making much of its research and results available to the public.