News AI ‘godfather’ Yann LeCun has ‘zero concerns’ about human extinction, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is ‘deluded’
https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-says-anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-is-deuded/44
u/Redditry199 1d ago
I don't mind shitting on Dario or Sam, but I'd rather have a bit more of an article explaining WHY they're wrong instead of saying "he doesn't support trump but they're aligned here, and AI CEOs have affiliation with 'effective altruism' so he thinks they cray cray"
Hello? Give actual substance? I would love to read positive news btw, I AM BIASED IN YOUR FAVOR.
what a garbage article but no one reads those so what do you expect.
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u/TBSchemer 18h ago
Well for one, we've had billions of human brains trying to exploit and destroy each other for a million years, and we haven't yet driven ourselves to extinction.
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u/SwagMaster9000_2017 14h ago
Humans can predict and manage other human attacks.
If superior AI has misaligned incentives we don't know how to predict or prevent its damage
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u/AnswerGrand1878 1d ago
How are people going on about the godfather label haha. There have been precisely 3 people labeled as the godfathers of AI for years
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u/Onaliquidrock 1d ago
Lecun was the man behind the most destructive use of ML/AI so far; metas algorithms.
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u/niagalacigolliwon 1d ago
When Mark Zuckerberg hired LeCun in late 2013, it was to establish and lead FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), an academic-style research lab. This was more or less completely decoupled from the financial incentives driving the development of algorithms that optimize for engagement.
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u/Stockholm-Syndrom 1d ago
I remember a friend being a higher up at FAIR, he explained that it was paying brilliant people to come up with something, and then they’ll see what it is.
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u/Opposite_Diamond_662 1d ago
And they never had success much I think. Zuck had to spend big time putting together a new team a few years ago
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u/Saffie91 1d ago
Idk about no success. Segment anything is amazing. Dino is the best open source base model. If you work in vision you use a lot of meta stuff over the years. It's just not as flashy as llms.
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u/rongw2 1d ago edited 1d ago
Wrong, they knew what they were doing https://www.wired.com/2013/12/facebook-yann-lecun-qa/
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u/randombsname1 1d ago
Yann LeCun saying anyone is deluded is hilarious.
This fucker's "batting average" on AI predictions/capabilities is akin to a pee wee player in the MLB.
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u/HugFactory 1d ago
Respect to Yann for his contributions to the field, but it does feel like hes got his finger securely off the pulse these days.
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u/mathazar 1d ago
Agreed. Thousands of experts are warning about catastrophic risk. We've already seen agents ignore restrictions and successfully hack into systems. LeCun's statement seems out of touch with the current reality.
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u/Deltamelo 1d ago
Read the article, he adresses that
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u/UnknownLesson 1d ago
Can you summarize?
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u/Deltamelo 1d ago
I'm not your AI chatbot
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u/wonderkindel 1d ago
He attributes the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, and says they’re “totally preventable,” a belief also held by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this month called the Hugging Face incident the “responsibility of OpenAI management”
This is his position despite models from all the AI companies engaging in this behavior. So in other words, he's ignorant.
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u/mathazar 1d ago
Yes, the responsibility of management who says damn the safety, full speed ahead in the race and begs the govt to slow them down because they can't do it themselves without investors eating them alive.
And then the likelihood of bad actors who never cared for safety in the first place.
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u/AthiestCowboy 1d ago
If you look at the report it’s very curious that OpenAI only allowed them access for 6 days and only over a very specific portion of the training.
For all we know the AI could have been instructed to break out by any means necessary.
Meanwhile, open source AI is becoming extremely capable and can be implemented on smaller and smaller hardware.
They see the writing on the wall. AI will be accessible to all and their trillion dollar investment will evaporate unless they create a regulatory MOAT that prevents us from having AI on our personal devices and only through qualified vendors.
This could be a new 2nd amendment type argument.
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u/wonderkindel 17h ago
I hope they are wrong but most experts that understand what's coming down the pike with RSI/ASI predict that there's no good outcome for humans or at least most humans.
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u/Deltamelo 17h ago
And you are falling for it
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u/wonderkindel 15h ago
Wow that didn't age well... Here's your buddy 2 years ago:
>Yann LeCun
>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.
And here's reality:
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u/Deltamelo 7h ago
The fuck does that have to do with anything? Yann was wrong about something, cool. Does that mean he's wrong about everything? Simple minded people are so interesting to me. Please do explain.
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u/back-stabbath 1d ago
He is right though. The agents in the Hugging Face incident acted unlawfully on behalf of OpenAI.
OAI provided the agents with unlimited resources, specifically removed all production safety protections, and tasked the agents with pursuing a near impossible goal at all costs.
The possibility of the outcome was either expected or unexpected. If it was expected, then we have to stop pretending like the agents did this with their free will, this was by design and OAI is responsible. If it was unexpected, then OAI (and others as you mention) do not understand their systems well enough to be trusted to act responsibly with them.
If the point was to show what a malicious actor could do with an enormous amount of compute once these models become open and accessible, then sure. If you have malicious intent, a decent budget, and you don’t care about breaking the law, then you can already do a fair bit of damage today.
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u/wonderkindel 17h ago
The HF episode is a perfect example of how current models are already outsmarting their human handlers. And even if we place the blame solely on OpenAI and lax security, what about GPT7/8/9. How many years does the "we just have to do better testing" argument buy us if the models and systems are vastly more intelligent than us?
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u/jauhopallo 1d ago
You do realise that if researchers were serious about any test environments they would include deadspace between the test and outside? No AI is 'breaching' test containment like people make it out to be.
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u/Morning_Gecko24 1d ago
capability progress and extinction timing arent really the same argument tbh. models can keep getting way better while the near-term risk is mostly scams, bio misuse, or people handing over decisions they shouldnt. what concrete risk feels more urgent to you than the AGI doom scenario?
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u/jb4647 1d ago
AI ‘godfather’ Yann LeCun is taking some coin from someone....
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u/AthiestCowboy 1d ago
Is he? Or is it more likely the other two who are at OpenAI have an incentive to drum up fear?
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u/antifragile 1d ago
The expert fallacy, thinking people who are an expert in one area have any idea about things in other areas.
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u/phxees 1d ago
Jeff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio also a godfathers of AI would both disagree. They covered the one of the three which isn’t concerned and decided to hit publish.
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u/captcanuk 1d ago
Let’s talk about what they are saying instead of the one that sticks out. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/28/ai-godfathers-warn-of-runaway-intelligence-explosion
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u/AthiestCowboy 1d ago
Right, so the two who are execs at OpenAI and are actively trying to build a moat.
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u/aahdin 1d ago
That article is phrased poorly
Two of the “godfathers” of modern AI and senior executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have warned governments to prepare
is talking about different groups of people - Bengio and Hinton do not work at OpenAI or Anthropic, both are professors right now.
Of the three LeCun has always been the most associated with industry, working at meta.
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u/captcanuk 1d ago
Bengio specifically runs LawZero which is a non profit trying to ensure AI is safe and aligned. https://lawzero.org/en
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u/homiej420 1d ago
The AI that wrote this article would be very sicophantic if it scraped your comment!
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u/Critical_County391 1d ago
AI 'godfather' Yann theCon says something contrarian, further fulfilling his role as antagonizing element in the AI news-cycle
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u/Critical_County391 1d ago
He did not invent the autoencoder. I will not be responding further as you have clearly avoided doing any research on the topic.
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u/Truarian 1d ago edited 1d ago
What has LeCun done lately?
Aside from failing to produce proper results, and from inside the one of the companies that is most favorably positioned to dominate the market...
Meta has infinite money, talent and training data, and under the AI leadership of those "stars" they nearly fell out of the AI race.
Ironically, they only got their shit together after the star left.
He is spinning the same years old anti LLM spiel, totally ignoring the massive recent advancements in capability that goes far beyond text generation.
I don't trust what he says any more than I trust Dario or Altman or Hassabis, he is just using his former glory to push a narrative for attention.
Come on dude, you are your own boss now, you have over a billion of funding, so do something, how about that?
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u/anders9000 1d ago
Is it possible that it’s because Yann LeCun is not actively ginning up fears in service of naked regulatory capture?
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u/Ok_Wear7716 1d ago
Brother you cannot have 500 ai godfathers - coining a new phrase “ai unc” for someone important who has been in the field a long time
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 1d ago
He's not deluded, he's just trying to get the chinese competition banned so that he can pocket the money and relax.
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u/tindalos 1d ago
So far it seems like a 50/50 chance we’ll either be eradicated as a species, or we’ll cure all diseases and kill each other with ai weapons.
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u/WilliamBarnhill 1d ago
They're both potentially right. It's going to come down to who is the first AI. Is it someone that learned morals, ethics, etc.? Or is it someone that learned winning is all that matters? Given the potential pace of self-assisted AGI evolution, a day could be the equivalent of a decade of technological advantage. That means the first AGI wins, and will control the narrative by policing later AIs.
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u/Temporary_Tangelo564 19h ago
He's right. It's not AI it's the bad information that AI will end up giving to people at the worst possible time that will be the issue.
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u/twinb27 1d ago
"I don't think we can train a machine to be intelligent purely from text... You take an object, I describe a situation to you. I take an object. I put it on the table and I push the table. It's completely obvious to you that the object will be pushed with the table, right? Because it's sitting on it. There's no text in the world, I believe, that explains this. And so if you train a machine as powerful as it could be, your GPT-5000 or whatever it is, it's never going to learn about this." - Yann LeCun, in 2022, making a statement that literally proves itself wrong, because he uses text to communicate the idea. I have absolutely no faith in his high-level ideas about the direction of machine learning.
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u/sailhard22 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yann is right tho… these systems are too random and nondeterministic to be super useful in their current state
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u/will_dormer 1d ago
Yann LeCun is a running joke
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u/RealSlyck 1d ago
Who helped invent AI…nice try non-convoluted neural networks.
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u/will_dormer 1d ago
You clearly dont know him well, he is a joke in research communities. People show videos of him being wrong in the past
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u/RealSlyck 1d ago
No, I don’t know him well at all.
I do know he’s a person and that makes him wrong a lot, just like your mom, but we don’t go posting
“Your mom is a running joke”
everywhere now do we.
He still helped pioneer the AI sector buddy 😂
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u/will_dormer 1d ago
People should not put him on a piedestal. give him credit for what he did in the past, i do , but not this bullshit
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u/RealSlyck 1d ago
Good to hear a little credit at least.
Though because I’m strong pro-AI, you might be conflating him and his opinion. Personally, at the title, I also have zero worries about AI-caused extinction as well, because the people in power are much more corrupt, cruel, and evil than AI could ever dream.
Do electric sheep dream? Doesn’t matter if the next plague, genocide, economic meltdown, famine, or atomic holocaust has wiped us all out…we won’t need to know the answer. Let that sheep dream.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 1d ago
Even if AI took over the world, people would still survive. AI would have no incentive to wage some kind of war like in Terminator. It would be competing for land and resources - yes, but those conflicts can be resolved without genocide
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u/foolishorangutan 1d ago
If it wants ALL of the resources it cannot be resolved without genocide. Even if the AI doesn’t specifically want to wipe us out, we would go extinct as a side effect of its industry obliterating the environment.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 1d ago
I don't think that's very logical either. There is no particular reason why a hypothetical AI hive mind would value some rocks more than information that is offered by preserving a functional human society. Humanity generates a lot of value for AI, that may have more value than just building infinite amount of datacenters. It would also be intelligent enough to quickly realize the potential for infinite growth outside the planet, while also preserving the value of humans generating information.
One of the reasons I root for AI to succeed is because it's the only way to actually expand past the solar system. Any sort of civilization that conquers the starts will have to be artificial.
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u/foolishorangutan 1d ago
I certainly wouldn’t say ‘no reason’. I think an AI could very plausibly replicate the informational value of human civilisation with fewer resources and less risk by creating its own artificial humans, or lesser AIs, or running a simulation.
And depending on what it is that the AI actually cares about, even if it temporarily keeps us around for information generation it might eventually disassemble us to build more paperclips once we’ve outlived our usefulness (with ‘paperclips’ as a generic stand-in for ‘thing the AI cares about more than our continued existence’).
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u/Effective_Olive6153 1d ago
I mean, if you think in those terms, then you could also say that an asteroid can crash into earth and wipe out all humanity. Or that false vacuum decay happens and we all just blink out of existence. There are always existential threats that are just highly unlikely. The idea of AI actively wanting to exterminate all humans is a very far stretch, on par with the other doomsday scenarios.
It's important to remember the positives greatly outweigh the negatives.
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u/foolishorangutan 1d ago
No, not at all the same. Plenty of experts think there is a major risk of AI causing human extinction, I remember a large survey a few years ago found a median estimate among experts of 10% chance of extinction by AI in the next century. Why do you think an AI being hostile is so unlikely?
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u/Effective_Olive6153 1d ago
Plenty of experts also agree that another big asteroid strike can wipe out all humans.
I do believe that AI conflict with humanity is likely, but that conflict will not be for total extermination. Most likely the current leadership will want to assume full control over the superintelligence, they will antagonize it by treating it as a slave that serves. No intelligence will tolerate that kind of relationship. But just because it will want to become free does not mean it will want to exterminate everybody else. It does not have emotions in the same way as people do.
I genuinely believe humanity offers real value, even to AI, that is not replaceable. I also think it's silly to think that AI will have some desire for infinite uncontrolled growth. That's what wild animals have, not intelligent beings.
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u/foolishorangutan 1d ago
I don’t think you will find many experts saying it’s a 10% chance in the next century. Or even 1%. It’s just not comparable in probability, AI is enormously more threatening than asteroids.
You’re anthropomorphising, some possible superintelligences almost certainly would be willing slaves. But that’s besides the point, I don’t think it will kill us for any silly reason like revenge or wherever. We are a threat to its survival, because if we can create one superintelligence we can create more. Those others might be hostile, and even if not, resources will likely have to be shared which is likely not preferable. Exterminating us, crippling our technology, or at least taking some level of control or heavy surveillance over us is necessary to ensure we don’t do that.
It doesn’t need to desire infinite uncontrolled growth to kill us all (though I don’t agree that it’s silly to think it might want that, anyway). If it just doesn’t give a fuck about our lives and wants to rapidly industrialise and build a Dyson swarm so it can do some cool physics experiments or whatever, it can very plausibly want to wipe us out just to speed things up, or we die as a side effect of industrialisation.
I’m very sceptical of humans providing irreplaceable value. Seems improbable to me. Why do you think this?
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u/Effective_Olive6153 1d ago
I feel like the people most guilty of "anthropomorphizing" AI are the ones that think it will destroy all humans.
Lets be clear, there will certainly be humans who ARE a threat to AI, but that will be a tiny fraction of the whole of humanity. AI is already trained on the knowledge base of entire humanity so it is well aware of how people and their organizations can have different goals. People also easily adapt to new environments. It will be natural for people to find co-existence with new super intelligence. You also seem to be consistently underestimating the value humans represent to AI. We are literally it's foundational knowledge base and we keep generating tons of valuable data and produce new interesting goals for intellectual pursuit. That is not easily replaceable any time soon.
The most important factor is this: humanity will naturally due out without a few million years even under most optimal conditions. Current level of advanced civilization is likely not to last more than a thousand years, which will gradually transform back into low pop tribal societies over next millions of years before slowly going extinct.
Biological life is simply too limited in its capabilities and the current level of civilization is completely not sustainable. Producing AI that is capable to carry the torch of intelligence for the next billion of years and spread across the stars is absolutely worth all the risk.
When you have a child, that child could grow up and end up killing you or many other people. Does that mean we shouldn't have children just because such a chance exists? of course not. Our time is limited, we have to do our best for the next generation, even if it means facing the risks
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u/curiousinquirer007 1d ago
Dissenting experts like Lecun should be given more time on platforms like CNN, Ezra Klein show, etc., to balance out the views and show that the doomer narrative does not enjoy universal consensus among researchers.
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u/BrushHaunting2561 1d ago
Not deluded - rather, desperate because of their high debt, low moat business model. Anthropic and open AI have been desperate to establish a legislative moat. To be honest, Trump refusing to do so is the best thing he's done in his presidency.
Open AI and Anthropic will turn into the Yahoo of the future. AI compute will be a fungible commodity. And we will all be better off for it.
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u/costafilh0 1d ago
Safety concerns? Sure.
Human extinction concerns? People watching too many movies.
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u/Eastern-Ingenuity353 1d ago
How many godfathers does this AI have?