Yann LeCun On Artificial General Intelligence And The Digital Commons

Yann LeCun being interviewed by John Werner at Imagination in Action, Davos Switzerland

Patrick Tighe

As January comes to an end, many of us who attended the annual summit at Davos are pondering next steps, considering the context of AI today, and still trying to parse the interactions between us humans, and ever-evolving AI agents that will accommodate us, inspire us, rival us, and generally make us re-evaluate our place in the world. I interviewed Yann LeCun at our annual Imagination in Action event (I put this event together, it’s free to attend, and it’s designed to foster discussions of timely, important topics). The result was an eye-opening series of revelations about how artificial intelligence research is changing, and what it might lead to relatively soon.

Getting Realistic About AGI

First, do we now “have AGI?”

Speaking on the prospect of artificial general intelligence, LeCun suggested it’s a misnomer, because human intelligence, in his view, is not general. He prefers the term “human-level intelligence,” and while acknowledging that we are approaching this type of AI, we’re not likely to see it this year, or next year.

“We need a few conceptual breakthroughs,” LeCun said, explaining the deficits of today’s LLMs in more detail. The gist of his argument was this: although there are absolutely reasons to hype today’s LLMs as intelligent, we have to remember that humans still have the edge in knowing how to navigate the physical world. LeCun spoke rather pointedly about this, explaining that although LLMs can do a lot of intellectual work, they don’t have the world knowledge to rival humans at many aspects of life. In other words, they’re book-smart, but not street-smart.

LeCun put it this way:

“If you want intelligent behavior, you need a system to be able to anticipate what’s going to happen in the world, and also predict the consequences of its actions. If you can do this, then it can plan a sequence of actions to arrive at a…

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