This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat

Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal profiles Yann LeCun, AI pioneer and senior researcher at Meta. As you’d expect, LeCun is a big believer in machine intelligence���but has no illusions about the limitations of the current crop of generative AI models. Their talent for language distracts us from their shortcomings:

Today���s models are really just predicting the nextword in a text, he says. But they���re so good at thisthat they fool us. And because of their enormous memorycapacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in factthey���re merely regurgitating information they���ve alreadybeen trained on.

���We are used to the idea that people or entities thatcan express themselves, or manipulate language, aresmart���but that���s not true,��� says LeCun. ���You can manipulatelanguage and not be smart, and that���s basically whatLLMs are demonstrating.���

As I’m fond of saying, these are not answer machines, they’re dream machines: “When you ask generative AI for an answer, it���s not giving you the answer; it knows only how to give you something that looks like an answer.”

LLMs are fact-challenged and reasoning-incapable. But they are fantastic at language and communication. Instead of relying on them to give answers, the best bet is to rely on them to drive interfaces and interactions. Treat machine-generated results as signals, not facts. Communicate with them as interpreters, not truth-tellers.

This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat | WSJ