Yann LeCun
@ylecun
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Professor at NYU. Chief AI Scientist at Meta. Researcher in AI, Machine Learning, Robotics, etc. ACM Turing Award Laureate.
New York
Joined June 2009
I do not write posts on X. I tweet links to posts on other platforms. I like and retweet (occasionally).I comment on friends' tweets (rarely).Follow me on. ⬇️⬇️⬇️.
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My opinion of @elonmusk.I like his cars (I own a 2015 S, and 2023 S), his rockets, his solar energy systems, and his satellite communication system. I also like his positions on open source and patents. But I very much disagree with him on a number of issues. I disagree with.
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@elonmusk @bneiluj @how_many_roads_ Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?.
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You know @elonmusk, I really feel sorry for you and your family to have been infected by a mind virus. But the best defense against a mind virus is intelligence, knowledge, and science. Fighting a mind virus by promoting other mental pathogens, like Trumpism, conspiracy.
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Must have been my tweet in defense of Anthony Fauci. Elon's call for Fauci to be prosecuted and imprisoned is pretty high up on the scale of anti-science assholery. Apparently, mistreating scientists is habit, whether they work for him or not.
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This is huge: Llama-v2 is open source, with a license that authorizes commercial use!. This is going to change the landscape of the LLM market. Llama-v2 is available on Microsoft Azure and will be available on AWS, Hugging Face and other providers. Pretrained and fine-tuned.
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X is a $44 billion propaganda machine. Yet it attempts to disguise itself as a defender of unfettered free speech, a source of factual information, and a substitute for professional journalism.
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) paid $44 billion dollars for a social media platform so that he could promote Donald Trump and MAGA. It's one of the most expensive (if not the most expensive) campaign tools for a politician ever deployed. It's a $44 billion dollar propaganda machine.
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@elonmusk 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.
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Elon has apparently one genuine technical paper indexed by Google Scholar:."An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform With Thousands of Channels".Published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2019. The authors?."Elon Musk and Neuralink". I'm sure the scientists
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@how_many_roads_ @elonmusk I like his cars, his rockets, his solar panels, and his satellite network. I very much dislike his vengeful politics, his conspiracy theories, and his hype.
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This dude has absolutely no idea WTF he's talking about. The total net worth of my former PhD students alone would make any silvery Wall Street dude turn green with envy.
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Funny how the American Far Right feels the need to claim that every election they lose is rigged, even outside the US, apparently. The French Far Right was not "denied a victory.".It just did not win because most voters did not vote for them, thankfully.
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- Engineer: I invented this new thing. I call it a ballpen 🖊️.- TwitterSphere: OMG, people could write horrible things with it, like misinformation, propaganda, hate speech. Ban it now!.- Writing Doomers: imagine if everyone can get a ballpen. This could destroy society. There.
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So much misunderstanding of this comment!.Here is a list of things I am *NOT* saying:.- you need a PhD to do Science. You don't. A PhD teaches you to do research, but you can learn that on your own (though it's much easier with a mentor). - you need to get papers accepted by a.
@elonmusk @jeremymstamper @bneiluj @how_many_roads_ To qualify as Science a piece of research must be correct and reproducible. To be correct and reproducible, it must be described in sufficient details in a publication. To be 'published' (to receive a seal of approval) the publication must be checked for correctness by reviewers.
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@elonmusk @jeremymstamper @bneiluj @how_many_roads_ To qualify as Science a piece of research must be correct and reproducible. To be correct and reproducible, it must be described in sufficient details in a publication. To be 'published' (to receive a seal of approval) the publication must be checked for correctness by reviewers.
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* Language is low bandwidth: less than 12 bytes/second. A person can read 270 words/minutes, or 4.5 words/second, which is 12 bytes/s (assuming 2 bytes per token and 0.75 words per token). A modern LLM is typically trained with 1x10^13 two-byte tokens, which is 2x10^13 bytes.
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A reminder that people can disagree about important things but still be good friends.
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@elonmusk @bneiluj @how_many_roads_ To those who say 'these are *just* papers': .One of these papers introduced convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) in 1989. Every single driving assistance system today uses ConvNets. That includes MobilEye (since 2014), Nvidia, Tesla, and just about everyone else.
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WhatsApp vs iMessage is the new metric vs imperial. The entire world uses WhatsApp, save a few people who are iPhone-clutching Americans or from a country where WhatsApp is banned (like China). Yet iMessage users will actually claim it's objectively better, just like they will.
Can someone explain to me with rational arguments why Americans prefer iMessage over WhatsApp?.
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Fun memories.
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Current LLMs are trained on text data that would take 20,000 years for a human to read. And still, they haven't learned that if A is the same as B, then B is the same as A. Humans get a lot smarter than that with comparatively little training data. Even corvids, parrots, dogs,.
@DrJimFan @RichardSSutton Animals and humans get very smart very quickly with vastly smaller amounts of training data. My money is on new architectures that would learn as efficiently as animals and humans. Using more data (synthetic or not) is a temporary stopgap made necessary by the limitations of our.
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I'm old enough to remember that in France in the 1960s and 1970s, far-right chauvinists were accusing Portugese immigrants of eating cats. It's an old trope. Today, making such an accusation publicly against an ethnic group violates laws against "incitement to racial hatred" in.
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@elonmusk X is not a source. At best, it's a relay. In practice, it's largely a propaganda megaphone for people like you, relayed by.your fanbois and fanbots. In any case, it reflects the increasingly one-sided bias of its users. And yes, the press (finally) covers Trump negatively, like.
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@elonmusk Objectively, *you* are the biggest threat to democracy in America today. You are an oligarch who bought himself a huge megaphone so he could use it to support a would-be dictator, and to discredit the press, scientists, research organizations, the electoral process, and all the.
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The mark of the authoritarian: .- Undermine the trust of the public in the sources of reliable information: the media, professional journalists, Wikipedia, universities, scientists, and government agencies. - Accuse those sources of being corrupt, woke, Marxist, fascist, beholden
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If you are a student interested in building the next generation of AI systems, don't work on LLMs.
The Godfather of AI is at #VivaTech!.Yann LeCun (@ylecun) advises students coming into the industry:."Don't work on LLM. This is in the hands of large companies, there's nothing you can bring to the table. You should work on next-gen AI systems that lift the limitations of LLMs.
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It seems to me that before "urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us" we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat. Such a sense of urgency reveals an extremely distorted view of reality. No wonder the more.
Stepping away from this job has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, because we urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.
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Congrats John and Geoff!.Both are former colleagues. I did my postdoc in Geoff's lab in Toronto. After that, I joined Bell Labs, where John was a part-time scientist (and a professor at Caltech). In fact, John was the reason why the department I joined was working on neural nets.
BREAKING NEWS.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Physics to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
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The kind of attacks that Dr Anthony Fauci is being subjected to by Republicans is disgraceful and dangerous. This man is a hero. He helped save *millions* of lives. Yet, he is vilified by Republican members of congress who are more interested in political expediency and.
Fox News, Newsmax, and House Republicans are desperately trying to revive covid conspiracy theories this morning by somehow pinning the pandemic on Fauci -- the one guy in Trump's orbit who was sane and rational throughout the ordeal. They don't want to have a reality-based
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🥁 Llama3 is out 🥁.8B and 70B models available today. 8k context length. Trained with 15 trillion tokens on a custom-built 24k GPU cluster. Great performance on various benchmarks, with Llam3-8B doing better than Llama2-70B in some cases. More versions are coming over the next
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To be clear: I'm not criticizing OpenAI's work nor their claims. I'm trying to correct a *perception* by the public & the media who see chatGPT as this incredibly new, innovative, & unique technological breakthrough that is far ahead of everyone else. It's just not.
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@elonmusk @realDonaldTrump I think you and Trump should do us a favor and launch yourselves to Mars tomorrow.
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Oh your god.
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@elonmusk @stclairashley You know what can *actually* be the downfall of Western civilization?. People who dismiss facts, disparage scientists and the journalists, side with aspiring dictators, disseminate batshit-crazy conspiracy theories, and buy themselves a medium to amplify them.
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Thank you IIT Madras for hosting me yesterday. I got to take a selfie with the audience of my Subaru Suresh Distinguished Lecture.
@iitmadras was proud to host @ylecun on campus yesterday. Yan LeCun from @Meta delivered an inspiring technical talk at IIT Madras and a public lecture at Music Academy, Chennai. Special thanks to @kris_sg and Prof. Subra Suresh for their support in making this a success. Thank
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The year is 1440 and the Catholic Church has called for a 6 months moratorium on the use of the printing press and the movable type. Imagine what could happen if commoners get access to books!.They could read the Bible for themselves and society would be destroyed.
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I am extremely honored to be the recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, and absolutely delighted to be sharing it with my friends and colleagues Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. NYT:.
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If you are a student or academic researcher and want to make progress towards human-level AI:.>>>DO NOT WORK ON LLMs<<<. LLMs are an off ramp. Thousands of engineers are working on LLMs with enormous computing resources. The only way you could possibly contribute is by analyzing.
Great talk by @ylecun yesterday, at the scientific symposium for the opening of the @ELLISInst_Tue! I took the liberty of summarizing one of his main take-home messages.
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<sarcasm>.Come work at ClosedAI. With AGI just around the corner, your shares will be worth 42 sextillionnollars. We can claw back your vested shares if you quit, unless you sign a non-disparagement agreement. Oh wait, sorry, we didn't realize our contract was this harsh until.
First among those is a binding commitment to non-retaliation. Even now, OpenAI can prevent employees from selling their equity, rendering it effectively worthless for an unknown period of time.
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I don't wanna say "I told you so", but I told you so. Quote: "Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training - the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled.
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💥BOOM 💥 Llama 3.1 is out 💥.405B, 70B, 8B versions. Main takeaways:.1. 405B performance is on par with the best closed models. 2. Open/free weights and code, with a license that enables fine-tuning, distillation into other models, and deployment anywhere. 3. 128k context.
With today’s launch of our Llama 3.1 collection of models we’re making history with the largest and most capable open source AI model ever released. 128K context length, multilingual support, and new safety tools. Download 405B and our improved 8B & 70B here.
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Giving a talk at IIT Madras on October 22.
Public Lecture.Join us at the Subra Suresh Distinguished #Lecture Series III, featuring @ylecun , VP & Chief AI Scientist at #Meta and Turing Award winner! Discover insights on "How Could Machines Reach Human-Level Intelligence?" on October 22, 2024, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM at
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@tegmark @RishiSunak @vonderleyen Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei are the ones doing massive corporate lobbying at the moment. They are the ones who are attempting to perform a regulatory capture of the AI industry. You, Geoff, and Yoshua are giving ammunition to those who are lobbying for a ban on open AI R&D. If.
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But seriously folks, this a short and juicy tirade in which I say:.(0) there will be superhuman AI in the future.(1) they will be under our control.(2) they will not dominate us nor kill us.(3) they will mediate all of our interactions with the digital world.(4) hence, they will.
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Worth repeating:.Do not confuse retrieval with reasoning. Do not confuse rote learning with understanding. Do not confuse accumulated knowledge with intelligence.
mini rant:. the illusion LLMs are intelligent comes from their massive scale. it is hard to visualize, but these things memorized the WHOLE internet. everything you've ever asked it, either has been solved before, or is a simple combination of existing solutions. but that's still.
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As I've pointed out a number of times, claims that immigrants vote illegally or that illegal immigrants are being let into the US to "import voters" are crazy-ass conspiracy theories and propaganda disseminated by people with a Trumpist political agenda, like @elonmusk. The.
In the past 24 hours, .@elonmusk has posted multiple false claims about voters being "imported" illegally. These claims are 100% false, and I again implore him to talk to actual election officials or experts to learn the reality of our secure elections. /1.
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Meta will *not* release the multimodal versions of its AI products and models in the EU because of an unpredictable regulatory environment. This means that EU users of Ray-Ban Meta won't be able to use the image understanding features. It also means that the EU industry will not.
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Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*. One of the main challenges to improve LLM reliability is to replace Auto-Regressive token prediction with planning. Pretty much every top lab (FAIR, DeepMind, OpenAI etc) is working on that and some have already published.
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<not_an_april_fool_joke>.By amplifying human intelligence, AI may cause a new Renaissance, perhaps a new phase of the Enlightenment. But prophecies of AI doom are also causing a new form of medieval obscurantism. </not_an_april_fool_joke>.
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@elonmusk Hard disagree. X merely tells you that someone, somewhere, noticed something. But then, one needs to know if this something is true or false, where it came from, what the context is, and whether it is, indeed, propaganda. Figuring this out is what good journalists do.
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Many (rich) people on the Right do not actually believe in democracy. They have a huge superiority complex. They think the populace can be brainwashed into supporting policies that profit them and their rich friends at the expense of the majority. So they buy themselves.
@vkhosla @realDonaldTrump Trump will save democracy and America. Mark my words. Kamala/Harris would be a disaster.
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@elonmusk Elon Musk didn't just buy Twitter. He bought a propaganda machine to influence how you think. Rupert Murdoch didn't just buy Fox and the NY Post. He bought a propaganda machine to influence how you think. Sinclair didn't just buy 193 TV stations. They bought a propaganda.
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@elonmusk No. 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.
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@DrJimFan @RichardSSutton Animals and humans get very smart very quickly with vastly smaller amounts of training data. My money is on new architectures that would learn as efficiently as animals and humans. Using more data (synthetic or not) is a temporary stopgap made necessary by the limitations of our.
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Where are European companies?.
6 of the top 8 corporate R&D spenders are American tech firms 🇺🇸. Cc: @erikbryn @Noahpinion @JTLonsdale @ElbridgeColby
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@elonmusk Nope. It's perfectly legal. It's illegal for foreigners to contribute *money* to campaigns. But it's perfectly legal for foreigners to campaigns on behalf of a candidate .Campaigning is speech. Speech Is protected by the 1st Amendment. As you probably know.
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Sometimes, the obvious must be studied so it can be asserted with full confidence:.- LLMs can not answer questions whose answers are not in their training set in some form, .- they can not solve problems they haven't been trained on, .- they can not acquire new skills our.
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MMS: Massively Multilingual Speech. - Can do speech2text and text speech in 1100 languages. - Can recognize 4000 spoken languages. - Code and models available under the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. - half the word error rate of Whisper. Code+Models: Paper:.
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You know what's unethical?.Scaring people with made-up risks of a technology that is both useful and beneficial.
It's fascinating that some folks who are probably great science fiction writers are somehow considering their writing about AI risk as scientific research. A thread on imagined existential risks, creativity & a lack of it, history, LLMs, safety, regulation and anti-hype hypers.
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Today, I was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by President Macron at the Élysée Palace. Président Macron gave a wonderful speech.
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"Our country is being poisoned" by immigrants, like me, @elonmusk, @sundarpichai, @satyanadella, @vkhosla, Jensen Huang, and two of Trump's three wives.
Donald Trump’s racist remarks about immigrants during today’s Moms for Liberty meeting: “Our country is being poisoned … they’re going into the classrooms and taking disease, and they don’t even speak English. It’s crazy.”
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Language is an imperfect, incomplete, and low-bandwidth serialization protocol for the internal data structures we call thoughts.
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@elonmusk So, you've gone full-throttle sexist now?. This "observation," which is not based on any actual observation, flies in the face of every study of conservatism in social psychology. Many studies show that conservatism is associated with social conformity and a submission to.
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CoPE: Contextual Positional Encoding. A new paper from FAIR that @elonmusk could use to improve Grok.
🚨 Contextual Position Encoding (CoPE) 🚨. Context matters! CoPE is a new positional encoding method for transformers that takes into account *context*. - Can "count" distances per head dependent on need, e.g. i-th sentence or paragraph, words, verbs, etc. Not just tokens. -
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No. 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.
AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year. By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined.
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Let me clear a *huge* misunderstanding here. The generation of mostly realistic-looking videos from prompts *does not* indicate that a system understands the physical world. Generation is very different from causal prediction from a world model. The space of plausible videos is.
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@elonmusk @realDonaldTrump Calm down, dude. We will become a multiplanet species regardless of who gets elected. We will even become a multiplanet species if you die tomorrow. Our multiplanet future will happen faster if Kamala Harris is elected because you need someone who:.(1) will not crash the.
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@elonmusk This item is news. News you don't like, but factual news. I realize you may have lost touch with the concept of factual news. Google is not controlled by "far left activists" and neither is Meta. But X is objectively controlled by a conspiratorial, far right propagandist.
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World models, intuitive physics, planning, problem solving, discrete search for solutions, continuous optimization of control parameters. Dogs manage to do all this with 2 billion neurons. Why debate human-level AI when we can't approach dog-level intelligence yet?.1/N.
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People studying misinformation lean left for two reasons:.1. scientists lean left, regardless of specialty, because they care about facts. 2. misinformation today primarily comes from the Right ("they're eating the dawwwgs!") which makes it worth studying and fighting against for.
“Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.” . — O'Brien (1984 by George Orwell). Misinformation experts largely lean in a single direction politically. This skew can, will, and does impact
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Dear journalists, it makes absolutely no sense to write:."PaLM 2 is trained on about 340 billion parameters. By comparison, GPT-4 is rumored to be trained on a massive dataset of 1.8 trillion parameters.".It would make more sense to write:."PaLM 2 possesses about 340 billion.
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AI is not some sort of natural phenomenon that will just emerge and become dangerous. *WE* design it and *WE* build it. I can imagine thousands of scenarios where a turbojet goes terribly wrong. Yet we managed to make turbojets insanely reliable before deploying them widely.
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@elonmusk Almost all of the federal funding to universities goes to STEM and biomedical research. The amount going to social science is a rounding error, and to humanities (including social criticism), it's essentially zero. STEM research in universities is the root of *all* the
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Simply put, Trump is a traitor.
Trump, once again, is trashing President Zelensky, blames the US for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and suggests Ukraine must surrender because Russia always wins wars: “That’s what they do. They fight wars”. Despicable Traitor .
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Hey @elonmusk, this is your champion of free speech?.Putting people in jail for criticizing Supreme Court justices?.
Trump says Americans who criticize the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade should be imprisoned: “These people should be put in jail for the way they talk about our judges and justices”
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Some folks say "I'm scared of AGI". Are they scared of flying?.No!.Not because airplanes can't crash. But because engineers have made airliners very safe. Why would AI be any different?.Why should AI engineers be more scared of AI than aircraft engineers were scared of flying?.
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If language were sufficient to express human thought, why would we need visual arts, music, dance?.
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I testified in front of the US Senate Subcommittee on Intelligences yesterday. I argued that the rapid and free exchange of ideas, scientific publications, open source code, and trained models is the reason that AI has progressed so fast in the last decade. I also pointed out.
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I actually do have Elon's number. But we haven't spoken in a while.
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Cats dominate humanity.Super-smart scientists are often recluse and introvert. Which goes to show that.intelligence is neither.necessary nor sufficient.for world domination.
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IBM & Meta are launching the AI Alliance to advance *open* & reliable AI. The list of over 50 founding members from industry, government, and academia include AMD, Anyscale, CERN, Hugging Face, the Linux Foundation, NASA.
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@DavidSacks Dude, this is the way a two-round multiparty electoral system works. What you call a conspiracy is the very normal game of alliances. It is "just voting.".Let's not pretend you understand how this works.
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LLMs are useful, but they are an off ramp on the road to human-level AI. If you are a PhD student, don't work on LLMs. Try to discover methods that would lift the limitations of LLMs.
Yann LeCun tells PhD students there is no point working on LLMs because they are only an off-ramp on the highway to ultimate intelligence
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I've made that point before:.- LLM: 1E13 tokens x 0.75 word/token x 2 bytes/token = 1E13 bytes. - 4 year old child: 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1E6 optical nerve fibers x 2 eyes x 10 bytes/s = 1E15 bytes. In 4 years, a child has seen 50 times more data than the biggest LLMs.
"A 4-year-old child has seen 50x more information than the biggest LLMs that we have." - @ylecun . 20mb per second through the optical nerve for 16k wake hours 🤯. LLMs may have consumed all available text, but when it comes to other sensory inputs. they haven't even started.
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