Delve into the intricacies of Artificial Intelligence with the Lex Fridman Podcast, where Lex dives into a stimulating conversation with Meta AI's Yann Lecun. Together, they explore Meta's commitment to an open-source AI framework and Lecun's vision for democratic AI development. The release of LaMa models into the public domain illustrates the initiative to distribute power and inspire innovation across the globe, demonstrated by LaMa's adaptation for multilingual use in India. This approach reflects a wider ambition to support a diverse AI ecosystem akin to the free press's role in democracy.
In a thoughtfully navigated discussion, Fridman and Lecun scrutinize the current constraints of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mimicking human intelligence, unveiling their specific deficiencies in physical understanding and complex reasoning. Lecun shares insights into his proposed solution for these gaps, emphasizing the potential of joint embedding techniques over mere reconstruction training in neural networks. Furthermore, they consider the evolutionary nature of AI advancements, contrasting the current challenges with the aspirational future where AI could potentially revolutionize human intellect, much like the printing press did centuries ago.
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Meta AI, steered by Yann Lecun, embraces an open-source approach for their AI models, like LaMa, to promote innovation and maintain a diversified AI ecosystem. LaMa 2 has already been released, and LaMa 3 is anticipated to follow suit, according to Lex Fridman. The open-source strategy allows various entities such as individuals, NGOs, and governments to adapt these models for different purposes. Lecun cites the example of LaMa being adapted to speak all 22 official languages of India, demonstrating its extensive adaptability. The vision behind this approach is to prevent power concentration within the AI industry and to stimulate a broad range of innovations while maintaining a democratic ethos in AI development akin to the necessity of a diverse free press for democracy.
Large language models (LLMs) suffer from significant limitations, as discussed by Lecun and Fridman. Lecun points out that LLMs lack understanding of the physical world, memory, reasoning, and planning capabilities, as well as the ability to grasp non-linguistic sensory data. Their responses resemble subconscious reactions, failing to showcase any deep reasoning or planning. This leads to errors that exponentially grow with the number of tokens produced, revealing the models' limitations in engaging with real-world expertise or executing complex tasks. While LLMs may simulate high-level human learning patterns, their lack of common sense and planning abilities indicates a substantial gap in achieving human-like intelligence.
Lecun sheds light on the limitations of neural networks that are trained to reconstruct corrupted images and do not generalize well for other tasks such as object recognition. He proposes that incorporating joint embedding of pixel data and abstract concepts leads to more useful representations. Self-supervised learning advances, particularly those using contrastive learning and joint embedding, have shown promising results compared to reconstruction techniques. Lecun notes the success of 'textless' speech-to-speech translation using internal speech representation and urges that vision systems should learn about the world independently before integrating language data to avoid relying on language as a crutch.
AI's progression towards advanced world-modeling capabilities and understanding of the physical world will be gradual. Lecun asserts that AI still requires common sense and physical world knowledge that it currently lacks. There is ongoing research, like the publication on VJPA, which aims at understanding the physical world through video training, reasoning, and planning. However, AI faces a challenge in hierarchical planning, which is necessary for sophisticated tasks but remains an unsolved problem in AI. The need for AI to predict and plan actions through an internal world model is critical for achieving true intelligence, but this development will take time.
Lecun is optimistic about AI's role in augmenting human intelligence, comparing it to the historical impact of the printing press that facilitated the enlightenment. He envisages AI-powered smart assistants that could help humans execute complex tasks more efficiently, enhancing decision-making and compensating for human cognitive limitations. This positive integration of AI has the potential to elevate human reasoning, learning, and problem-solving to unprecedented levels, just as the printing press expanded human access to knowledge and triggered significant societal changes.
1-Page Summary
Yann Lecun and Meta AI endorse the paradigm of open-source artificial intelligence, articulating their strategy to foster innovation and ensure a diverse ecosystem by sharing Meta's cutting-edge AI models like LaMa with the world.
Lecun highlighted the benefits of releasing models like LaMa 2 as open source, allowing for adaptability across various domains by different stakeholders, including citizens, NGOs, governments, and companies. Lex Fridman mentions that Meta AI has already released their model LaMa 2 as open source and plans to open-source LaMa 3 as well. It's indicated that the open sourcing of these models allows anyone in the community to build on top of them.
Lecun mentions that Meta's open source model, La MaTou (presumably LaMa 2), has found widespread use, being downloaded millions of times and fine-tuned for applications such as speaking all 22 official languages of India. By publishing its research and making their models like LaMa available for public use, Meta is cultivating a collaborative AI research and development environment.
The open source approach adopted by Meta AI fosters a thriving and diverse AI ecosystem. Lecun envisions a future where companies can specialize in tailoring open-source AI systems for industry-specific applications. This democratization accelerates progress and fuels a wide range of innovative applications.
Drawing from Mark Andreessen's tweet, open source is presented as an antidote to the challenges faced by big tech companies. It enables start ...
Meta's open source vision
Yann Lecun and Lex Fridman discuss the limitations of large language models (LLMs), emphasizing the importance of recognizing what they cannot do in order to guide future AI research.
Lecun outlines several critical characteristics that LLMs lack: understanding the physical world, ability to remember and retrieve things (persistent memory), reasoning, and planning. He asserts that LLMs do not have an internal world model and are incapable of these or can only do them in a very primitive way, meaning they do not truly understand the physical world or lack persistent memory, and are unable to truly reason or plan.
According to Lecun, LLMs fail to truly reason or plan their answers as their output is similar to subconscious, automatic responses that do not involve deliberate thinking. While LLMs can solve problems down to a certain level involving language, they cannot perform tasks that require an understanding of the physical world, such as climbing stairs.
Lecun suggests that intelligence must be grounded in reality, not possible through language alone because physical tasks require mental models for planning and action, which do not depend on language. LLMs do not have access to the types of non-linguistic sensory data that humans use to learn about the physical world.
Yann Lecun states that despite their ability to pass exams, LLMs are incapable of performing simple physical tasks that humans learn quickly. He explains that LLMs generate answers through "autoregressive prediction," where each word produced can lead the response away from reasonable answers, decreasing the chance of a correct sequence as more tokens are produced.
Errors in LLMs accumulate exponentially with the number of tokens, leading to nonsensical answers, showing LLMs' lack of understanding and reasoning. According to Lecun, LLMs act as a lookup table and fail they lack a deep level of knowledge that would enable them to apply instructions effectively in the physical world. LLMs cannot replace real-world expertise or execute complex tasks like building a bioweapon or chemical weapon, which require more than following a list of instructions.
Lecun also states that LLMs, being purely trained from text, do not have access to most information about reality that is not expressed in language, and crucial early childhood information largely absent from texts is not present in LLM training data. He suggests that language is an approximate representation of percepts and mental models and ...
LLMs are limited
Yann Lecun explains the challenges in understanding visual data through neural networks and suggests that joint embedding of pixel data and abstract concepts leads to more useful representations for tasks like object recognition.
Lecun discusses the shortcomings of self-supervised learning in visual data, particularly with neural networks that attempt to reconstruct corrupted images or videos. He explains that these models do not generalize well for tasks such as object recognition as they are trained only on specific tasks. These attempts at developing representations by having models predict missing parts from a corrupted version have essentially been a complete failure. This includes the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) technique developed by Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which, similar to how language models (LLMs) are trained with corrupted text, trains neural networks to reconstruct images by filling in missing patches.
On the other hand, Lecun highlights the success of joint embedding techniques for learning better representations of the world. He mentions self-supervised learning advancements in various areas, attributing them partly to joint embedding architectures trained with contrastive learning. He hints at the advantage of embedding abstract concepts alongside pixel data to improve representations, resulting in what appears to be promising alternatives to reconstruction-based techniques.
In particular, Lecun explains that joint embedding and predicting in representation space, instead of trying to predict every pixel, enables learning good representations of the real world. This process involves taking an original image alongside a corrupted or transformed version, running both through encoders, and then predicting the full representation using joint embedding. This method overcomes the limitations of recon ...
Jointly embedding sensory data gets better representations
Yann Lecun emphasizes that significant progress toward advanced AI through world modeling and understanding of the physical world will be a gradual process, rather than an immediate transition.
Lecun argues that AI needs to acquire common sense and knowledge about the physical world. He states that for AI to function at a human level, systems will need to understand how the world works and be able to develop good representations, but this is going to take time. AI does not currently possess the common sense or deep understanding of the physical world necessary for tasks like fully autonomous driving or completely independent domestic robots.
Lecun notes that language-based AI systems may struggle with scenarios they haven't encountered in language and may not be able to determine what is possible. Current language models do not share the common experience of the world that humans do, which forms the basis of how high-level language concepts are understood.
Lecun indicates that advancements in AI will be tracked through published research, like the recent publication of the VJPA work. Future systems will need to train from video to understand the physical world, reason, and plan to gain true intelligence. This will take time, as there is a problem with generative models trained on video that fail to predict a sequence of events because they attempt to predict one frame at a time.
Preliminary results from systems trained on video suggest that AI is moving toward being able to understand if a sequence of events in a video is possible or impossible due to physical inconsistencies. Lecun describes the need for AI to have an internal model that can predict states of the world at future times based on current actions taken. He suggests that with such a model, AI could perform planning to achieve specific objectives by predicting the consequences of sequences of actions.
Advanced AI will emerge gradually, not suddenly
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday life may have profound implications for human intelligence, potentially amplifying our capabilities and enabling smarter decision-making.
Yann Lecun, a leading AI researcher, is optimistic about the potential of AI to extend human intellectual capacities. He envisions a future where each individual could have a team of smart AI assistants at their disposal. Such AI assistants could perform tasks with greater accuracy and efficiency than humans, effectively enhancing our ability to manage complex information and execute intricate tasks.
Lecun is not alone in his thinking. He suggests that the existence of machines that exceed human intelligence should not be seen as a threat, but as an asset. By compensating for human limitations, AI could help humans avoid mistakes that stem from a lack of intelligence or knowledge.
Drawing from historical parallels, Lecun compares the potential impact of AI on human intellect to that of the printing press. The printing press vastly increased access to knowledge, which in turn made people smart ...
AI can make humans smarter over time
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