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A fresh debate over the future of artificial intelligence (AI) broke out recently among some of the world’s most influential AI leaders. Former Meta AI scientist Yann LeCun in his recent appearance on a podcast said that there is no such thing as general intelligence, arguing that human intelligence itself is not truly general. According to him, human intelligence is highly specialised for the physical world, adding what people perceive as general intelligence is largely an illusion. “We only seem general because we can’t imagine the problems we’re blind to,” LeCun said. “This concept of general intelligence” he said. A clip from the podcast was shared on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) that caught the attention of Google DeepMind CEO and Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis who publicly disagreed with LeCun’s views. Calling Yann’s opinion “plain incorrect”, Demis said that he’s confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence.”
What Demis Hassabis wrote ‘correcting’ MetaAI Chief Scientist
Quoting an X post with LeCun’s clip, Hassabis wrote:“Yann is just plain incorrect here, he’s confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence.Brains are the most exquisite and complex phenomena we know of in the universe (so far), and they are in fact extremely general.Obviously one can’t circumvent the no free lunch theorem so in a practical and finite system there always has to be some degree of specialisation around the target distribution that is being learnt.But the point about generality is that in theory, in the Turing Machine sense, the architecture of such a general system is capable of learning anything computable given enough time and memory (and data), and the human brain (and AI foundation models) are approximate Turing Machines.Finally, with regards to Yann’s comments about chess players, it’s amazing that humans could have invented chess in the first place (and all the other aspects of modern civilization from science to 747s!) let alone get as brilliant at it as someone like Magnus. He may not be strictly optimal (after all he has finite memory and limited time to make a decision) but it’s incredible what he and we can do with our brains given they were evolved for hunter gathering.”
