Meta’s AI boss says an ‘AI war’ is underway and Nvidia is ‘supplying the weapons’
Meta AI President Yann LeCun spoke about the state of artificial intelligence and quantum computing across the industry at a recent event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) team.
In LeCun’s comments, he touched on Nvidia’s current dominance of the AI hardware industry, the likelihood of human-level AI emerging in the near future, and why Meta is not currently pursuing quantum computing along with its competitors.
By “not soon”, unlike many in the AI industry, I mean “definitely not in the next five years.”
Yes, I am skeptical of quantum computing, especially when applied to AI. https://t.co/5t63w1GNfL— Yann LeCun (@ylecu) December 3, 2023
artificial intelligence war
LeCun’s views on the imminence of so-called human-level AI are well-documented. He has long argued that “dog” and “cat” levels of AI must be achieved before the field is advanced enough to support human-level AI. And he has so far been reluctant to predict when these early milestones will occur.
In comparison, Elon Musk recently made a bold prediction that a “digital god” will arrive within the next three to five years.
Perhaps at the center of it all is NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. He recently said that AI could be able to complete tests in a “significantly competitive” way with humans within the next five years. Although this falls short of claiming full human-level capabilities, some experts view test-taking as a measure of AI ability.
LeCun is clearly not one of them. At FAIR’s 10th anniversary celebration, he made comments related to the Nvidia CEO’s claims.
“I know Jensen. There’s an AI war and he’s supplying the weapons.”
The statement from the Meta AI boss appears to refer to recent news that Nvidia is now the world’s most valuable chipmaker. This is largely because the company’s GPUs have become the status quo hardware for training large-scale language models like ChatGPT.
LeCun also explained that current technologies, cited as a potential spark for AGI, or generative AI, are not enough. “Text is a very poor source of information,” he said. “You can train the system on 20,000 years’ worth of reading material and it still doesn’t understand that if A is the same as B, then B is the same,” he added. As A.”
Related: Nvidia reports record third-quarter revenue of $18 billion and cites generative AI as a key driver.
quantum computing
Another area LeCun covered at the event was quantum computing. Unlike its competitors Google and Microsoft, Meta is relatively far removed from the quantum computing race.
“Quantum computing is a fascinating scientific topic,” LeCun said, but other comments made it clear that his view was that the technology was not yet mature. He said, “Many of the problems that can be solved by quantum computing can be solved much more efficiently by classical computers.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft recently signed a $100 million partnership with Canadian quantum computing company Photonic to bring a fault-tolerant, fully functional quantum networking system to market within the next five years.
