Mr. Lecunt. This is the lowest quality argument I have seen defending the safety of AI. Maybe ask ChatGPT for help.
OK, but engineers can invent things that are inherently safe, and things that are inherently unsafe. Just because the ball pen is safe doesn’t mean if an engineer invents a nuclear bomb it’s safe. Neither does the existence of the nuclear bomb prove the ballpoint is dangerous.
Almost as if different things are different.
I get it, but it’s not an easier way of doing the exact same thing the way a pen is a better pencil. A pen can’t code a computer virus on command or gain sentience.
Idk I heard John wick killed 3 men with a pencil
I think this is dumb, but I think it’s wild we live in a society where a school gets shot up several times a week and we’re talking about legislating AI in a way that likely will result in regulatory capture for safety.
It’s not like any amount of legislation is going to stop the people who want to misuse AI. It’d be harder than guns to stop, and require absolutely draconian curbs on freedom. Are we going to start treating graphics cards like fissile material? Is the government gonna regularly scan by SSD? They can’t stop heroin, guns, human trafficking and people honestly think that they’re going to regulate away the dangers of something that can be shared with text files?
Get real. Pandora’s box is open. I’m much more scared of large corporations and state actors armed with AI than I am some ‘unibomber’ lone wolf. Imagine the scale of something like McCarthyism powered by AI.
The only thing legislating AI development is going to do is kill it outside of a few tech companies who can afford lobbyists. I hope you want to live in a future where the labor market gets destroyed and the only people who can operate this technology are megacorporations.
Government DOES require a license for pen manufacturers. WTF is this guy’s point??
If any manufacturer produces any products that are toxic and harmful then the government revokes its right to operate via either whatever regulatory authorities exist in that industry, or ultimately the DOJ, if they need to.
Can I agree with someone and still call their argument bad?
What a braindead fucking take
This is a bad look for him. It’s a bad faith comparison
I fucking loathe Facebook and this doesn’t help.
That said, Altman being the spokesperson for AI safety does deserve windmill dunking.
This is so disingenuous and gaslight-y it makes me *more* worried about AI, and in particular that the people working on it take safety seriously. AI is more like nuclear power than it is a new tool to do something we already can do safely in a slightly better way.
I thought these engineers were supposed to be smart. What a silly facile argument. He’s arguing at the 6th grade level.
This horrible argument is a great reminder of why we need to teach people the humanities lol
Some people did actually decry the ballpoint pen when it was invented because they thought it would ruin penmanship. It did, but nobody cares now because nobody wants to go back to walking around with a jar of loose ink and a sharp bird feather.
Is he seriously arguing that AI shouldn’t be regulated because it’s no more harmful than ballpoint pens? What did I just read?
Engineer: I invented this new thing. I call it a nuclear bomb.
LeCun: Cool, let everyone have one, no questions asked.
I agree tbh
Who tf calls it a ballpen? its ballpoint pen…
Its a bad analogy and he should feel bad
And it’s been downhill since fire.
There was a time when new tech was limited to people with the skills and knowledge to adopt it.
ChatGPT would need you to check out a repo, build something and use it via command line.
Today, not only is it a couple of clicks to a website but ChatGPT will handhold you through almost any tech process.
In our world, photographs and money are just ballpoint drawings, newspapers are written on scraps of paper, and books are notepads.
Now we’ve just handed out ballpoint pens to the unwashed masses. It’s going to be carnage.
But, we don’t have a choice, you can’t ban a plastic pen, we have to develop more tech to keep society running smoothly.
Movable type printing press: “This will foster a climate where radical thinkers can disseminate their ideas freely.”
Recorded music: “This will eliminate much of our culture of communal singing.”
Calculator: “Mental arithmetic skills will decline so far, shop workers will need their calculators to figure out ounces and pounds.”
All these things came to pass.
What a nothing comparison
Put aside the risk for hate speech, ballpoint pens never threatened vast swaths of the world job market. Progress is inevitable but we can help mitigate the short term damage
This is what a sociopath looks like. *Fuck other people, I’m making money here!*
Said the guy working for a company that refused to act on Instagram causing teen suicides and compared it to car crashes that kill people. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri : “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar.” smh
!Remindme 3 years
Pretty much sums up how Meta’s blaze attitude toward the effects their social media platform would have on people fucked everything up, too.
Like comparing a rock with a grenade…just WOW 🤦 🤦
This is true.
However, has nobody read/played “I have no mouth but I must scream”?
The threat of AI, as embodied by AM in the story, is not so much the device itself, but rather the device enabling the illnesses and dysfunctions of mankind to be imposed on a much greater scale, by providing strength of mind to those who would not normally possess enough to cause problems.
Ballpen is to AI same as international space station is to a tent. Is that the premise of that post? That’s stupid.
The printing press is a better analogy. Was it a boon for mankind? Yes. Did it kick off the reformation and centuries of war? Also yes.
Comparing AGI to a pen is probably the dumbest argument I’ve heard so far.
Ballpoint pens aren’t really capable of being integrated / turned into autonomous agents that are capable of wreaking havoc on the internet and humanity’s corpus of knowledge.
bad analogy
The guy in charge of AI at Meta is trying to say that AI shouldn’t be regulated?
Imagine that.
So, just for historical context: the invention of the printing press in Europe kicked off like a century of brutal, bitter religious and ideological struggle. I’m not decrying that invention, but it’s really not so simple as to just say these are unambiguous goods. Especially now that have, you know, nukes
I have a ball, i have a pen – ballpen!
I think 99% of the people here didn’t understand the “argument” at all.
He is just trying to argue how overblown and unreasonable a lot of the criticism in regards to AI is.
Does this say that AI shouldn’t be regulated? No
Does this say AI is as harmless as a ballpen? No
You can interpret it that way, but then again what can you even say that isn’t easily misinterpreted in the most asinine ways possible online?
A ballpen was deliberately chosen as a very mundane example because most people know it and get the point.
It’s a rhetoric tool, but if you read some of the top comments here it’s apparently the most disgusting, disingenuous fallacy imaginable and an obvious attempt to brainwash and mislead the reader!!!
That’s a terrible argument. And just because a tool is useful doesn’t mean it should be unregulated.
Way, way more akin to a nuclear bomb than a pen, otherwise people wouldn’t be quite so fussed.
This is the definition of a straw man argument, for anyone interested in critical thinking.
Stephen Hawking, among others, warned against its dangers for a reason- not because he feared another ballpoint pen.
It’s a wonderful tech, and the cat is obviously out of the bag to a certain degree, but it’s a little naive and actually somewhat deceptive to liken an existential risk to something harmless.
Should raise at least tiny lil red flag for even the most overt ai supporters, that the chief scientist of a major ai company considers it more important to *downplay* risks instead of talk sensibly about them.
Such an unbelievably stupid analogy coming from such an unbelievably smart guy.
Should have asked ChatGPT to write him a better argument.
42 replies on “Chief AI Scientist at Meta”
Mr. Lecunt. This is the lowest quality argument I have seen defending the safety of AI. Maybe ask ChatGPT for help.
OK, but engineers can invent things that are inherently safe, and things that are inherently unsafe. Just because the ball pen is safe doesn’t mean if an engineer invents a nuclear bomb it’s safe. Neither does the existence of the nuclear bomb prove the ballpoint is dangerous.
Almost as if different things are different.
I get it, but it’s not an easier way of doing the exact same thing the way a pen is a better pencil. A pen can’t code a computer virus on command or gain sentience.
Idk I heard John wick killed 3 men with a pencil
I think this is dumb, but I think it’s wild we live in a society where a school gets shot up several times a week and we’re talking about legislating AI in a way that likely will result in regulatory capture for safety.
It’s not like any amount of legislation is going to stop the people who want to misuse AI. It’d be harder than guns to stop, and require absolutely draconian curbs on freedom. Are we going to start treating graphics cards like fissile material? Is the government gonna regularly scan by SSD? They can’t stop heroin, guns, human trafficking and people honestly think that they’re going to regulate away the dangers of something that can be shared with text files?
Get real. Pandora’s box is open. I’m much more scared of large corporations and state actors armed with AI than I am some ‘unibomber’ lone wolf. Imagine the scale of something like McCarthyism powered by AI.
The only thing legislating AI development is going to do is kill it outside of a few tech companies who can afford lobbyists. I hope you want to live in a future where the labor market gets destroyed and the only people who can operate this technology are megacorporations.
Government DOES require a license for pen manufacturers. WTF is this guy’s point??
If any manufacturer produces any products that are toxic and harmful then the government revokes its right to operate via either whatever regulatory authorities exist in that industry, or ultimately the DOJ, if they need to.
Can I agree with someone and still call their argument bad?
What a braindead fucking take
This is a bad look for him. It’s a bad faith comparison
I fucking loathe Facebook and this doesn’t help.
That said, Altman being the spokesperson for AI safety does deserve windmill dunking.
This is so disingenuous and gaslight-y it makes me *more* worried about AI, and in particular that the people working on it take safety seriously. AI is more like nuclear power than it is a new tool to do something we already can do safely in a slightly better way.
I thought these engineers were supposed to be smart. What a silly facile argument. He’s arguing at the 6th grade level.
This horrible argument is a great reminder of why we need to teach people the humanities lol
Some people did actually decry the ballpoint pen when it was invented because they thought it would ruin penmanship. It did, but nobody cares now because nobody wants to go back to walking around with a jar of loose ink and a sharp bird feather.
Is he seriously arguing that AI shouldn’t be regulated because it’s no more harmful than ballpoint pens? What did I just read?
Engineer: I invented this new thing. I call it a nuclear bomb.
LeCun: Cool, let everyone have one, no questions asked.
I agree tbh
Who tf calls it a ballpen? its ballpoint pen…
Its a bad analogy and he should feel bad
And it’s been downhill since fire.
There was a time when new tech was limited to people with the skills and knowledge to adopt it.
ChatGPT would need you to check out a repo, build something and use it via command line.
Today, not only is it a couple of clicks to a website but ChatGPT will handhold you through almost any tech process.
In our world, photographs and money are just ballpoint drawings, newspapers are written on scraps of paper, and books are notepads.
Now we’ve just handed out ballpoint pens to the unwashed masses. It’s going to be carnage.
But, we don’t have a choice, you can’t ban a plastic pen, we have to develop more tech to keep society running smoothly.
Movable type printing press: “This will foster a climate where radical thinkers can disseminate their ideas freely.”
Recorded music: “This will eliminate much of our culture of communal singing.”
Calculator: “Mental arithmetic skills will decline so far, shop workers will need their calculators to figure out ounces and pounds.”
All these things came to pass.
What a nothing comparison
Put aside the risk for hate speech, ballpoint pens never threatened vast swaths of the world job market. Progress is inevitable but we can help mitigate the short term damage
This is what a sociopath looks like. *Fuck other people, I’m making money here!*
Said the guy working for a company that refused to act on Instagram causing teen suicides and compared it to car crashes that kill people. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri : “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar.” smh
!Remindme 3 years
Pretty much sums up how Meta’s blaze attitude toward the effects their social media platform would have on people fucked everything up, too.
Like comparing a rock with a grenade…just WOW 🤦 🤦
This is true.
However, has nobody read/played “I have no mouth but I must scream”?
The threat of AI, as embodied by AM in the story, is not so much the device itself, but rather the device enabling the illnesses and dysfunctions of mankind to be imposed on a much greater scale, by providing strength of mind to those who would not normally possess enough to cause problems.
Ballpen is to AI same as international space station is to a tent. Is that the premise of that post? That’s stupid.
The printing press is a better analogy. Was it a boon for mankind? Yes. Did it kick off the reformation and centuries of war? Also yes.
Comparing AGI to a pen is probably the dumbest argument I’ve heard so far.
Ballpoint pens aren’t really capable of being integrated / turned into autonomous agents that are capable of wreaking havoc on the internet and humanity’s corpus of knowledge.
bad analogy
The guy in charge of AI at Meta is trying to say that AI shouldn’t be regulated?
Imagine that.
So, just for historical context: the invention of the printing press in Europe kicked off like a century of brutal, bitter religious and ideological struggle. I’m not decrying that invention, but it’s really not so simple as to just say these are unambiguous goods. Especially now that have, you know, nukes
I have a ball, i have a pen – ballpen!
I think 99% of the people here didn’t understand the “argument” at all.
He is just trying to argue how overblown and unreasonable a lot of the criticism in regards to AI is.
Does this say that AI shouldn’t be regulated? No
Does this say AI is as harmless as a ballpen? No
You can interpret it that way, but then again what can you even say that isn’t easily misinterpreted in the most asinine ways possible online?
A ballpen was deliberately chosen as a very mundane example because most people know it and get the point.
It’s a rhetoric tool, but if you read some of the top comments here it’s apparently the most disgusting, disingenuous fallacy imaginable and an obvious attempt to brainwash and mislead the reader!!!
That’s a terrible argument. And just because a tool is useful doesn’t mean it should be unregulated.
Way, way more akin to a nuclear bomb than a pen, otherwise people wouldn’t be quite so fussed.
This is the definition of a straw man argument, for anyone interested in critical thinking.
Stephen Hawking, among others, warned against its dangers for a reason- not because he feared another ballpoint pen.
It’s a wonderful tech, and the cat is obviously out of the bag to a certain degree, but it’s a little naive and actually somewhat deceptive to liken an existential risk to something harmless.
Should raise at least tiny lil red flag for even the most overt ai supporters, that the chief scientist of a major ai company considers it more important to *downplay* risks instead of talk sensibly about them.
Such an unbelievably stupid analogy coming from such an unbelievably smart guy.
Should have asked ChatGPT to write him a better argument.