One of the three “Godfathers of AI” and Meta Platforms Inc.’s META chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has long voiced his disagreements regarding stringent AI regulations. He now appears to have compared it with the Romanian government’s stance on typewriters in 1983 when Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime was in power.
What Happened: On Monday, LeCun took to X (formerly Twitter) and shared a newsletter by Pessimists Archive titled “Remember Typewriter Licenses?”
The newsletter spoke about the year 1983, when “Ceausescu’s government enforced a law requiring typewriter owners (to) obtain a license from the police to own or even retain these ‘dangerous’ devices.”
The apparent reason behind this decision was to “curb clandestine leaflets critical of the Communist government.”
LeCun’s post on X suggested he compared this incident with the current focus on regulating AI developments. He said, “Obscurantism isn’t just preventing people from accessing knowledge. It’s also preventing people from exchanging knowledge.”
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Just last week, LeCun said that regulating research and development in AI, as poised to products, would lead to “unacceptable levels of policing and restrictions on the ‘freedom to compute.'”
Earlier, he also got into a heated argument with another AI pioneer, Geoffrey Hinton, who mocked his attempts to dismiss the potential risks posed by AI.
For the unversed, LeCun and Hinton are among three “Godfathers of AI,” with the third one being Yoshua Bengio. In 2018, they jointly received the Turing Award, also known as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.”
Why It’s Important: LeCun isn’t the only expert terming AI risk reports “overhyped.”
Previously, Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Google Brain, asserted that big tech companies are deceiving the public about the threat posed by AI.
In March earlier this year, Jaron Lanier, often called the “Godfather of Virtual Reality,” also dismissed concerns about AI outsmarting humans and taking over the world, saying that something like this only happens in science fiction movies like “The Matrix” or “Terminator.”
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