Elon Musk vs Yann LeCun

Ever seen a friendly banter morph into a feud? Today, we are about to tell you the story of a successful entrepreneur obsessed with building AGI, among other crazy things, and a godfather of AI who is obsessed with achieving cat-and-dog-level intelligence.?

Let’s dive right in—

The latter, Yann LeCun, is clearly winning the argument, or more accurately, has been successful in giving Elon Musk a reality check on his AGI goals, which he believes will be achieved next year, and how his companies are using existing technology developed by fellow researchers and scientists.?

Back to reality?

“Okay, maybe AGI is further away than I thought ??,” said Elon Musk, replying to a user on X who shared the screenshot of an illogical discussion with ChatGPT.?

The recent swordplay between LeCun and Musk comes against the backdrop of xAI announcing a Series B funding round of $6 billion to expand its team, making it the second-most valuable AI startup at a $24 billion valuation, outperformed only by OpenAI, which is at an $86 billion valuation.

It is impressive that xAI even surpassed Anthropic in less than a year, which is now valued at $18 billion and is the third-most valuable AI startup.

Speaking of Anthropic, Jan Leike, an OpenAI researcher who recently resigned over safety concerns, has joined its competitor to continue his work on AI oversight.?

Calls for animal-level intelligence?

LeCun believes that LLMs that power generative AI products such as ChatGPT will never achieve the ability to reason and plan like humans or achieve AGI. He is of the opinion that animals are more intelligent than AI.

“General intelligence, artificial or natural, does not exist. Cats, dogs, humans, and all animals have specialised intelligence,” said LeCun recently.?

Tesla’s FSD wouldn’t exist without LeCun?

The ripostes between LeCun and Musk started after the latter invited people to join xAI’s mission after the recent funding announcement. “Join xAI if you can stand a boss who claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure),” responded LeCun, advising interested candidates against joining Musk’s company.?

Further, he said that he likes Musk’s cars, rockets, solar panels, and satellite networks but dislikes his vengeful politics, conspiracy theories, and hype.

LeCun believes he is politically correct because he is a “scientist, not a business or product person” unlike Musk, who built Tesla and uses CNNs, aka ConvNets, developed by LeCun.?

However, Musk replied that they “don’t use CNNs much these days, tbh”.?

This left LeCun perplexed; he asked how Tesla does real-time image understanding in FSD without “ConvNets, TBH”.?

Musk is yet to respond. It is highly unlikely that Tesla is using anything other than CNNs, and if not CNNs, it is most likely using Google's Visual Transformer.?

Coincidentally, Meta recently released an in-depth introduction to Vision-Language Models, which promise transformative capabilities in image processing and navigation through advanced spatial and contextual understanding.?

Hating on Python is Literally a Skill Issue

The internet is buzzing, and once again, Python finds itself in the crosshairs. A user sparked a lively debate with her post on X: “Hating on Python is literally a skill issue.” This simple statement set off a firestorm of opinions.

The point, as succinctly captured in the phrase, suggests that those who criticise Python might be struggling with the language’s simplicity and accessibility. It’s reminiscent of the common gripe about C++: “C++ is terrible because of memory leaks.”?

Read the full story here.?