“Facebook’s parent company, Meta, held an event in San Francisco this week celebrating the 10-year anniversary of its Fundamental AI Research team. Meta’s chief scientist, Yann LeCun, revealed that society is more likely to witness “cat-level” or “dog-level” AI in the coming years than human-level AI. Unlike tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, Meta is not betting big on quantum computing.
LeCun shared that current AI systems are still years away from exhibiting any form of sentience or common sense capable of pushing their capabilities beyond the simple summarization of text. This contrasts the opinion of Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, who believes AI will surpass human intellectual tasks within five years.
During the event, LeCun pointed out the necessity to delve outside text data to make significant progress in AI development. He explained that despite the billions of lines of text used to train modern language models, AI still lacks the basics of understanding the world.
Meta has been investing in advanced AI systems, particularly in the development of multimodal AI models. Their focus is to create AI models that can process different forms of data, from visual to audio, and train them to harness hidden correlations between these data types. They even showcased a demo where AI-powered AR glasses coached a person on their tennis technique.
Although Meta has relied on Nvidia’s potent graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI training, LeCun hinted that new, non-graphical, neural-processing chips may be the future. As for quantum computing, Meta’s researchers don’t see it as a game-changer, emphasizing that classical computers can handle the same problems more efficiently.
Meta’s senior fellow, Mike Schroepfer, stated that the development of AI was the company’s priority a decade ago due to its potential for commercialization, rather than a fascination with quantum computing. This also comes amidst reports of Instagram’s harmful effects, putting Meta on the defensive. The future of AI remains an open field, with Meta at the forefront of creative and innovative AI development.”
