Computer scientist Yann LeCun: “Intelligence really is about learning”

Another driver to leave was that his work with world models and AMI was also proving to have potential uses that were not interesting to Meta, such as jet engines and heavy industry. And LeCun had no trouble finding investors who were willing to bet on the next generation of AI technologies.

In his next chapter, LeCun believes that setting up a “neolab,” meaning a start-up that does fundamental research, is the new, most fertile ground. He cites OpenAI former chief technology officer Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines (“I hope the investors know what they do”) and OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (“There I know the investors have no idea what they do”) as good examples.

His new architecture uses videos to give AI models an understanding of the physics of our world, which will allow them to make better predictions of what will happen next. The model also relies on “emotions,” meaning past experiences and evaluations, to guide its predictions.

“If I pinch you, you’re going to feel pain. But then your mental model of me is going to be affected by the fact that I just pinched you. And the next time I approach my arm to yours, you’re going to recoil. That’s your prediction, and the emotion it evokes is fear or avoidance of pain,” he says.

LeCun says we will see “baby” versions of this within 12 months, and on a larger scale within a few years. It’s not quite yet superintelligence, but a path toward it. “Maybe there is an obstacle we’re not seeing yet, but at least there is hope.”

After three and a half hours, we are now the only customers left in the restaurant. I ask him what he wants his legacy to be.

Increasing the amount of intelligence in the world, he replies, without batting an eyelid. “Intelligence is really the thing that we should have more of,” he says, adding that with more intelligence, there’s less human suffering, more rational decisions, and more understanding of the world and the universe.

“We suffer from stupidity.”

Melissa Heikkilä is the FT’s AI correspondent.

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