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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reignited his feud with one of the Godfathers of AI and MetaAI chief scientist Yann LeCun. In a post on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk mocked LeCun, sarcastically suggesting that Yann LeCun lacks the general intelligence that he dismisses as “complete BS”. It all started when Yann LeCun during a recent podcast appearance said that there is no such thing as general intelligence, arguing that human intelligence itself is not truly general.“There is no such thing as general intelligence…Human intelligence is super-specialized for the physical world, and our feeling of generality is an illusion…We only seem general because we can’t imagine the problems we’re blind to,” LeCun said, adding “the concept is BS”.A clip from the podcast was shared on X. Responding to the video post, Elon Musk wrote: “Definitely not in his case lol”. LeCun, who has been a vocal critic of Elon Musk in the past, has not replied to Musk’s comments.
Elon Musk’s feud with MetaAI Chief scientist
Interestingly, the feud between Elon Musk and Yann LeCum is not new and began years ago. In one of the early instances of the fight between the two, LeCun ‘advised’ Musk to stop being adviser to President Donald Trump during his first term. In a post dated January 29, 2017, LeCun said “you are an advisor to Trump. Quit. If you stay, fight and know that this will hurt your legacy regardless.”In 2024, LeCun snapped at Musk when he said AI “will probably be smarter than any single human next year.” “By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined,” the tech billionaire said in an X post then. LeCun rejected his views with a straight ‘No’ stating “If it were the case, we would have AI systems that could teach themselves to drive a car in 20 hours of practice, like any 17 year-old. But we still don’t have fully autonomous, reliable self-driving, even though we (you) have millions of hours of labeled training data”.
When Yann LeCun called out Elon Musk for spreading “crazy-ass conspiracy theories”
In May 2024, Elon Musk shared a hiring post for his AI company xAI. “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness,” he then wrote.Yann LeCun responded sharply to the post, mocking Elon Musk. The Meta’s chief AI scientist then wrote: Join xAI if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a “maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth” but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.
