Meta's Chief AI Scientist Dismisses Existential Risks of AI as Premature

According to Cointelegraph, Meta's chief artificial intelligence (AI) scientist, Yann LeCun, has reportedly dismissed concerns over the existential risks of AI as premature in a Financial Times interview. LeCun argued that premature regulation of AI technology would reinforce the dominance of Big Tech companies and stifle competition. He believes that regulators are using AI safety as a cover for what he calls 'regulatory capture.'Since the AI boom took off following the release of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT-4 in November 2022, various industry thought leaders have warned of potential threats to humanity posed by AI. Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the 'godfather of AI,' left his position in machine learning at Google to discuss the dangers of AI. Dan Hendrycks, Director of the Center for AI Safety, tweeted in May that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should become a global priority, on par with other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.However, LeCun dismissed the idea that AI could lead to humanity's demise as 'preposterous.' He argued that the debate on existential risk is very premature until a system can rival a cat in terms of learning capabilities, which does not currently exist. LeCun also claimed that current AI models are not as capable as some suggest, stating that they do not understand how the world works and are unable to 'plan' or 'reason.'LeCun expects that AI will eventually help manage our everyday lives, with everyone's interaction with the digital world being mediated by AI systems. Despite his optimism, fears surrounding the power of AI technology remain a concern for many. The AI task force advisor in the United Kingdom has warned that AI could threaten humanity within two years.