With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, mankind is entering a new era of enlightenment, says Yann LeCun, Vice-President and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Speaking at the Prof Subra Suresh Institute Lecture Series organized by the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, LeCun said that we need machines with “human level” intelligence — machines that understand how the world works, machines that can remember and machines that can reason and plan.
“We need human-level AI for intelligent assistant. In the near future, all of our interactions with the digital world will be mediated by Al assistants,” he said.
LeCun said the future Universal (AI) Assistants will constitute a repository of all human knowledge and culture. They will constitute a shared infrastructure — like the internet of today.
“The AI platforms must be open source. We need a diverse set of AI assistants for the same reasons we need a free press; linguistic; cultural and value system diversity. Culture and knowledge cannot be controlled by a few companies on the West Coast of the US or in China,” he said.
LeCun, who is also a faculty at New York University, giving the address on ‘How Could Machines Reach Human-Level Intelligence?’, said open research and source AI must be regulated out of existence. There is no question that machines will eventually surpass human intelligence in all domains, he noted.
On the benefits of human-level AI, he said AI will amplify human intelligence and will bring a new era of enlightenment — a new renaissance for humanity.
Animals and humans understand the physical world, have common sense, possess a persistent memory, can reason and can plan complex sequences of sub-goals and actions. These essential characteristics of intelligent behavior are still beyond the capabilities of today’s most powerful AI architectures, such as Auto-Regressive LLMs (Large Language Models), he said.
On his third visit to India, LeCun said, there is a lot of enthusiasm for AI in India. A lot of data is required from India, he said.
On the recent award of the Nobel in Physics to AI scientists, he said, the Nobel Committee was under some pressure to reward deep learning. You could see this because there were documentaries on Swedish TVs and news saying the Nobel committee gave the award to obscure contributions in physics, and why not to people who are revolutionizing and emerging the world with AI.
LeCun was awarded, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the 2018 Turing Award, often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize in Computer Science’, for his work on Deep Learning.