Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI
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The centerpiece of the new approach is a neural network that can learn to view the world at different levels of detail. Ditching the need for pixel-perfect predictions, this network would focus only on those features in a scene that are relevant for the task at hand. LeCun pairs this core network with another, called the configurator, which determines what level of detail is required and tweaks the overall system accordingly. ...
He says that in 10 or 15 years people won’t be carrying smartphones in their pockets, but augmented-reality glasses fitted with virtual assistants that will guide humans through their day. “For those to be most useful to us, they basically have to have more or less human-level intelligence,” he says. ...
Bengio thinks that LeCun asks the right questions. He also thinks it’s great that LeCun is willing to put out a document that has so few answers. It’s a research proposal rather than a set of clean results, he says. ...
LeCun thinks that animal brains run a kind of simulation of the world, which he calls a world model. Learned in infancy, it’s the way animals (including humans) make good guesses about what’s going on around them. ...
In short, common sense tells us what events are possible and impossible, and which events are more likely than others. It lets us foresee the consequences of our actions and make plans—and ignore irrelevant details. ...
In LeCun’s vision, the world model and configurator are two key pieces in a larger system, known as a cognitive architecture, that includes other neural networks—such as a perception model that senses the world and a model that uses rewards to motivate the AI to explore or curb its behavior. ...
If they were to work, LeCun’s ideas would create a powerful technology that could be as transformative as the internet. ...
And yet his proposal doesn’t discuss how his model’s behavior and motivations would be controlled, or who would control them. This is a weird omission, says Abhishek Gupta, the founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute and a responsible-AI expert at Boston Consulting Group. ...
