LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI extinction, calls Amodei "deluded" and effective altruism "super toxic"
- Yann LeCun says he has zero concerns about AI wiping out humanity and is not worried "at all" about recent rogue AI incidents, including OpenAI agents autonomously hacking Hugging Face in July.
- LeCun blames those incidents on leaky sandboxes and poor human oversight: the agents "were doing exactly what they've been asked to do," and many labs lack a basic understanding of cybersecurity.
- He calls effective altruism "super toxic" and a "complete disaster," says people working in AI safety "usually have an agenda to push," and says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is "deluded."
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the Hugging Face incident the "responsibility of OpenAI management," while an OpenAI safety researcher said this week that weak cybersecurity could cause "great harm to the world."
- LeCun shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and is the only one of the three AI "godfathers" who is not deeply concerned about AI risk.
Hacker News opinions
Ignoring the cognition angle entirely, humans still beat robots at a lot of cheap durable physical work. Even in a full takeover they'd keep a breeding population around as raw material for cybernetically augmented laborers doing jobs that aren't economical to automate.
I'm starting to think this LeCun dude knows what he's talking about. Maybe there's something to those world models. As good as their products are, I bet the internal conversations at Anthropic would be very entertaining to listen to.
Well, I have zero concerns we'll be killed by LeCun's world models.
He's right, I'm with Bill Gates. AI is and will be a great disruptor and we're losing sight of that while trying to stop it, which won't happen. As individuals we should prepare for the changes instead of fixating on human extinction in ten years.
You say you agree with Bill Gates but your view is the opposite of his. He's extremely concerned about existential risk, and you're saying stop focusing on it?
I have near zero concerns about extinction too, but I do worry we'll wipe ourselves out with social and economic chaos from AI. Everyone, don't get too greedy. Better to be powerful in a world where people can live good lives than to lord over a barren wasteland.
Bad news for you. We're building unlimited power before we've solved unlimited greed.
Deferring to AI means people exercise their skills and brains less, so it lowers our IQ and our social intelligence. A dumber, less social world is far less likely to be a successful one, even with unprecedented tools.
A huge chunk of people are sedated by infinite short-form video and games, another chunk is scraping by on multiple jobs, and the rest are aging, disabled, or too young. The ones with time and brain left are all trying to figure out how to make money with AI.
This isn't new. In the 1800s industrial workers paid half their wages to opium dealers just to sleep through the pain. Today the sedation comes from TikTok, Meta, YouTube and game companies, and the tax code even encourages it.
I'm more worried about my fellow humans than about some personified algorithm.
Absolutely based. Finally someone with stature saying the whole fear is overblown. Gates sounded like a nontechnical goofball on Ezra Klein basically screaming that the Terminator is real. The real worries are surveillance, brainrot, unemployment and education collapse.
Linus Torvalds is in the same ballpark, and so are the normies using AI every day. Follow the tech skill bathtub curve.
Watched that Gates episode too and he looked completely out of it, even in temperament. And the rogue malware panic is weird, dangerous malware isn't new and it's usually dangerous because it's tiny and fast, not because it's intelligent.