You take AI out of Facebook, and basically the services crumble, LeCun tells TNW.
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LeCun is not a fan of the term.
Hes previouslyarguedthat there is no such thing as AGI because human intelligence is nowhere near general.
However, he is keenly pursuing human-level AI.
His chosen technique for reaching it is self-supervised learning.
But in self-supervised learning often confused withunsupervised learning theres no need for human annotation.
Instead, the system generates signals from the data and uses them to train itself.
Theyd be able to learn world models that are predictive, which is essential to intelligence.
They were 100% right about this, says LeCun, now Facebooks chief AI scientist.
They decided tocreate a new research lab from scratch and handpicked LeCun to lead it.
What attracted me was there was a lot of opportunity.
LeCun immediately made open research the cornerstone of his plans.
The motivation behind this approach isnt purely altruistic.
The currency for a scientist is his or her intellectual impact on the community, says LeCun.
But isnt he worried that Facebooks rivals could steal the labs secrets?
Why would it be bad?
So we need to help the community advance as much as possible to open research.
The fact that other people use it is irrelevant.
An influential2014 papershowed how the approach could answer questions about the plot of theLord of the Rings.
DeepMind was working on a very similar idea exactly simultaneously, LeCun recalls.
At that time, DeepMind was one of the driving forces behind Londons emergence as a global AI hotbed.
It was a more difficult turf to enter, whereas continental Europe was completely open, says LeCun.
There was essentially no ambitious fundamental research lab in AI or even in information technology in continental Europe really.
FAIR has also helped Facebook use AI to find hate speech on the platform.
But these systems have received criticism fornot detecting every language.
However, self-supervised learning isexpanding the linguistic rangeof the tools.
But LeCun believes the technique will only reach its potential once it can reason like a human.
We dont know how long its going to take up to break through this first wall.
Theres good hope its going to happen soon, but how do we know?
And then well most likely encounter other obstacles that we dont realize exist.
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Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he e(show all)Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he enjoys playing chess (badly) and the guitar (even worse).
