During Nvidia’s annual GTC conference on Tuesday, where the company unveiled the new Blackwell Ultra family of AI chips (shipping later this year), Meta’s top AI executive clarified the relationship he thinks human beings will have with superintelligent AI.
Even if AI advances to the point where it is more intelligent than humans, capable of complex reasoning, understanding, and problem-solving, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun says humans will still be AI’s boss.
LeCun sat down for a fireside chat with Nvidia’s Chief Scientist Bill Dally and discussed the possibility of AI replacing human work. In response to Dally’s statement that “AI is not replacing people, it’s basically giving them power tools,” LeCun said that while AI may have the potential to do so, humans would never allow it to gain the upper hand.
The relationship between humans and future AI will be that of a boss and a staff of employees, the 64-year-old LeCun predicted. Every person will have a team of superintelligent AI behind them.
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“I mean, basically our relationship with future AI systems, including superintelligence, is that we’re going to be their boss,” LeCun said. “We’re gonna have a staff of superintelligent, beautiful people kind of working for us. I don’t know about you, but I like working with people who are smarter than me. It’s the greatest thing in the world.”
Yann LeCun. Photographer: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images
LeCun also said at the Nvidia conference that he doesn’t believe in a “catastrophe scenario” where a superintelligent and powerful AI wants to take over society.
Instead, he believes that humans will slowly and steadily design superintelligence so that its only aim will be to fulfill human-given tasks. In short, even AI smarter than humans will have to answer to humans.
It’s a message he’s said before. In a May 2024 post on X, LeCun wrote that superintelligent AI “will be a diligent problem solver serving us.”
The emergence of superintelligence is not going to be an event.
We don’t have anything close to a blueprint for superintelligent systems today.
At some point, we will come up with an architecture that can take us there.The design will start by having the intelligence level of… https://t.co/vIzphnSa0F
— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) May 31, 2024
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined a similar vision in his September blog post titled “The Intelligence Age.” Altman wrote that one day, every human will have a “personal AI team” consisting of AI experts in different areas that handle tasks like coordinating medical care.
However, superintelligence carries risks. OpenAI wrote in a December 2023 research paper that “a core challenge” of superintelligence is that human beings will have to oversee AI “much smarter than them,” leaving developers to ensure that even advanced AI remains safe and beneficial for humans. OpenAI researchers predicted that superintelligence could be developed within the next decade.
LeCun may be confident that humans will prevent advanced AI from taking over jobs, but not all industry leaders are as certain. Dario Amodei, for example, the CEO of $61.5 billion leading AI startup Anthropic, said last week that AI could write every line of code for software engineers within the next year.
