alt Hacker NewsI don't think it's "regardless", your opinion on LeCun being right should be highly correlated to your opinion on whether this is good for Europe.
If you think that LLMs are sufficient and RSI is imminent (<1 year), this is horrible for Europe. It is a distracting boondoggle exactly at the wrong time.
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Whenever I see claims about AGI being reachable through large language models, it reminds me of the miasma theory of disease. Many respectable medical professionals were convinced this was true, and they viewed the entire world through this lens. They interpreted data in ways that aligned with a miasmatic view.
Of course now we know this was delusional and it seems almost funny in retrospect. I feel the same way when I hear that 'just scale language models' suddenly created something that's true AGI, indistinguishable from human intelligence.
Just because you raise 1 billion dollars to do X doesn't mean you can't pivot and do Y if it is in the best interest of your mission.
I won't comment on Yann LeCun or his current technical strategy, but if you can avoid sunk cost fallacy and pivot nimbly I don't think it is bad for Europe at all. It is "1 billion dollars for an AI research lab", not "1 billion dollars to do X".
It's been 6 months away for 5 years now. In that time we've seen relatively mild incremental changes, not any qualitative ones. It's probably not 6 months away.
> RSI
Wait, we have another acronym to track. Is this the same/different than AGI and/or ASI?
It's sufficient to think that there is a chance that they will not be, however, for there to be a non-zero value to fund other approaches.
And even if you think the chance is zero, unless you also think there is a zero chance they will be capable of pivoting quickly, it might still be beneficial.
I think his views are largely flawed, but chances are there will still be lots of useful science coming out of it as well. Even if current architectures can achieve AGI, it does not mean there can't also be better, cheaper, more effective ways of doing the same things, and so exploring the space more broadly can still be of significant value.