- Artificial superintelligence is commonly understood as AI systems more advanced than human thinking.
- Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, says that people will still be the boss of AI.
- LeCun said he doesn’t believe in a “catastrophe scenario” in which AI runs amok.
Superintelligence is coming, but it won’t replace humans — for now, at least — Meta’s chief AI scientist said.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s top artificial intelligence exec, said on Tuesday during Nvidia’s GTC conference that AI could replace people but challenged whether humans would allow for that to happen. He was responding to a comment made by Nvidia’s chief scientist Bill Dally who said during their fireside chat, “AI is not replacing people, it’s basically giving them power tools.”
“Well, it might at some point, but I don’t think people will go for this, right,” LeCun said. “I mean basically our relationship with future AI systems, including superintelligence, is that we’re going to be their boss. We’re gonna have a staff of superintelligent, beautiful people kind of working for us. I don’t know about you, but I like working with people who are smarter than me. It’s the greatest thing in the world.”
AI industry leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk, often pose the advent of superintelligence — an AI system smarter than humans — as the event-horizon moment for humanity, where scientific innovation will prosper but also could lead to an extinction-level event.
LeCun has previously thrown cold water on a doomsday scenario caused by AI.
In an X post from 2024, LeCun called the idea of a superintelligence system taking over humans a “sci-fi trope/cliché” and a “ridiculous scenario that flies in the face of everything we know about how things work.”
“The emergence of superintelligence is not going to be an event,” he wrote in the post. “We don’t have anything close to a blueprint for superintelligent systems today. At some point, we will come up with an architecture that can take us there.”
LeCun and a spokesperson for Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
The chief AI scientist said during the Nvidia conference that there are dangers of misuse and unreliable AI — but the solution is “better AI.”
“The fix for this is better AI. Systems that have common sense maybe, a capacity of reasoning and checking whether the answers are correct, and assessing the reliability of their own answers which is not quite currently the case,” he said. “But the catastrophe scenario, frankly, I don’t believe in that.”
