Hello, and welcome to Eye on A.I. I’m writing this week from Paris, where yesterday I attended an event Meta held to showcase its latest A.I. research for members of the press, and where Viva Tech, one of Europe’s largest technology trade shows, kicked off today.
This past week was one in which a number of A.I. optimists made an effort to counter the increasingly vocal and influential A.I. doom narrative—the fear that A.I. poses a grave and existential risk to humanity and so must be heavily regulated and licensed through new national and international agencies.
One of the optimists firing a rhetorical artillery barrage was venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who penned a 7,000-word essay accusing the doomers of being either "Baptists" (essentially messianic zealots informed by cult-like social movements, such as Effective Altruism, that have adopted the danger of extinction from runaway A.I. as a core tenant, masked in the rationalist terms, but essentially no more scientific than transubstantiation) or "Bootleggers" (cynical players whose commercial interests align in hyping A.I. doom in order to prompt a regulatory response that cements their market position and hobbles the competition). I don’t agree with portions of Andreessen’s analysis—he uses strawmen, doesn’t engage deeply in taking apart counterarguments, and he is way too sanguine about the serious shortcomings of today’s A.I. systems and the risk of real harm they pose to individuals and democracy. But his essay is worth reading and the Baptist and Bootlegger analogy (which Andreessen borrowed from economic historian Bruce Yandle) is worth thinking about.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, is also a prominent A.I. optimist and it was bracing to hear his views at yesterday’s Meta event. LeCun thinks that the scenario that most worries the doomers—that we will somehow accidentally stumble into creating superintelligent A.I. that will escape our control before we even realize what’s happened—“is just preposterous.” LeCun says that is simply “not the way anything works in the world.” LeCun is confident that we humans, collectively, “are not stupid enough to roll out infinite power to systems that have not been thoroughly tested inside of sandboxes and virtual environments.”
Like Andreessen, LeCun thinks many recent proposals to regulate A.I. (such as a framework supported by companies like OpenAI and Microsoft to create new national and international A.I. agencies with licensing authority for the training of very large A.I. models) are a terrible idea. In LeCun's view, the companies supporting this are motivated by a desire to quash competition from open-source A.I. models and less well-resourced startups.
