Meta’s AI Chief Scientist Yann LeCun has weighed in on the debate over whether AI’s potential to develop human-like traits. According to LeCun, AI is not quite there yet. He stated that he believed human-like AI would take time, and that AI lacks four fundamental characteristics that define human intelligence.
According to LeCun, “Understanding the physical world, having persistent memory, being able to reason, and being able to plan, and planning complex actions, particularly planning hierarchically,” are four key human traits that AI models, especially large language models (LLMs), don’t have yet. While companies making these LLMs might have thought of those traits, all the existing attempts to bridge the gap between humans and AI have revolved around adding supplementary features to existing models.
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“For understanding the physical world, well, you train a separate vision system. And then you bolt it on the LLM. For memory, you know, you use RAG, or you bolt some associative memory on top of it, or you just make your model bigger,” LeCun said. RAG, which is short for retrieval augmented generation, is a technology that was pioneered by Meta — to enhance LLM responses with external knowledge.
LeCun also dismissed “current hacks,” and advocated for an alternative approach using what he calls “world-based models.” “You have some idea of the state of the world at time T, you imagine an action it might take, the world model predicts what the state of the world is going to be from the action you took and so, abstraction is the key for AI to accurately guess the infinite and unpredictable possibilities of the real world if it was to reach human-like intelligence,” he said. Meta is actively exploring this approach with something called “V-JEPA,” a non-generative model that learns by predicting masked parts of a video.
LeCun is regarded as one of the “godfathers of AI,” along with Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio. He is a staunch believer in AI having the potential to be as intelligent as humans, however he believes that would take time. He has previously challenged Elon Musk’s views on AI, and also tried to pacify concerns about AI taking over humanity.