Yann LeCun is just the latest founder of the new era of Artificial Intelligence to abandon big technology to continue doing science.
For many it is great news that one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence will stop working at one of the most powerful and hated companies in the world. For others, it is the inevitable consequence of the new regime that Mark Zuckerberg established this summer, after Lecun publicly stated that large language models like GPT are nothing more than statistical imitators of language and that “a cat knows a lot more about how the physical world works than an LLM.” Zuckerberg responded by creating a new laboratory dedicated to the search for “superintelligence,” a concept that Sam Altman has begun using to describe a system – for now 100% imaginary – capable of surpassing the capabilities of the human brain, suggesting that the ability to imitate it has already been achieved by his company OpenAI (it hasn’t). In an effort to reach them, Zuckerberg went talent hunting with a checkbook at rival labs Google and OpenAI and bought the company. start by Alexandr Wang to be able to integrate it as it did in the past with WhatsApp and Instagram.
Yann LeCun is one of the three godfathers of artificial intelligence, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. All three received the Turing Award in 2018 for their contributions to the field of neural networks and deep learning. There is also a godmother. Fei-Fei Li created the first database with millions of labeled images to teach neural networks to “understand” real-world objects and scenes. All four worked for years in the worst IT department. The AI had promised too many things, too many times, and had always been disappointing.
In 2012, Geoffrey Hinton created a company to exploit AlexNet, a deep neural network he had developed with his students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. It used NVIDIA GPUs to process data more efficiently and took advantage of the availability of massive amounts of data on the Internet to create dataset giant and cheap. Google bought the company to keep Hinton and the project. Sam Altman and Elon Musk hired Sutskever to do the same at OpenAI. Facebook hired Yann LeCun in December 2013 to do the same at Facebook. In 2017, Fei-Fei Li took a gap year from Stanford to work at Google as vice president and head of artificial intelligence in the Google Cloud division. Everyone thought that big tech companies would provide them with the right resources, equipment, and environment to do their jobs as well as possible.
Hinton left Google in May 2023 and now lectures about the risks of putting AI in the wrong hands. Sutskever left OpenAI after leading a coup against Sam Altman in November 2023, so he could take appropriate precautions instead of releasing prototypes into the world for immediate commercialization. Fei-Fei Li returned to university after a year and wrote a book about the intelligence race and the need to protect the university research model, despite its inequality of resources, for its guarantee of academic freedom and interdisciplinary thinking. They are the scientists who flee from a world dominated by the bosses marketing like Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk. A sign.
