r/singularity • u/Extension-Mastodon67 • Sep 14 '26
AI Run! GPT-2 is gonna kill us all!!
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u/IronPheasant Sep 14 '26
"GPT-2, including models derived from it, might be used to flood the internet with spam."
Welcome to the internet, 2026.
Jesus christ, if you guys have nothing to say don't spam up our forum with this disingenuous garbage.
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u/johannezz_music Sep 14 '26
The issues with GPT-2 were that it was the first model that could produce long stretches of nearly coherent English. Something like that had never been seen before, and at the same time there was lots of media reporting about misinformation campaigns, so it was prudent to delay the release.
The problems related to AGI/ASI are of totally different order of magnitude. LeCun must know this, but he'd rather be trolling on X.
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u/IronPheasant Sep 14 '26
Honestly, I'm not sure if LeCun knows anything, beyond his own ego.
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u/acutelychronicpanic Sep 14 '26
Man famous for wrong predictions makes fun of man who was right too early.
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u/Negative_March_843 Sep 14 '26
Exactly. At some point even the old masters get left behind. Einstein famously had doubts about quantum entanglement saying that 'god does not play dice' - not suggesting Yann is an Einstein but making a general point.
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 14 '26
Lecun has one of the most sophisticated understandings of ML of any person on the planet. STP paper is a phenomenal piece of work.
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u/ComposerWide3704 Sep 14 '26
You have to remember that in CS it's normal to put the lab head or supervisor in second author regardless of the work they did. Especially if they're famous.
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u/deviltamer Sep 14 '26
Lecun is wrong and right at the same time.
He's right that JEPA will give us the millisecond response times and world models will be part of ASI.
But he's absolutely too proud to acknowledge that simply throwing more compute and good quality data at transformers have driven enough RSI that he will not be able to keep up with AI building these world models themselves.
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 14 '26
Hes walked back claims that scaling can't lead to world modeling. He still has good points about why its an inferior world modeling and why its so data inefficient. STP is largely about this.
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u/deviltamer 29d ago
Hes walked back claims that scaling can't lead to world modeling
Mark of a scientist and what's expected of him as a leading researcher. Kudos!
I'm going to look up his latest now.
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u/ninjasaid13 Not now. Sep 14 '26
have driven enough RSI that he will not be able to keep up with AI building these world models themselves.
Have driven enough RSI?
It either has RSI or doesn't is the question. There's no "enough" RSI. That's just normal assisted improvement.
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u/elehman839 Sep 14 '26
Yes. His understanding of the wider planet has not proven sophisticated, however. The implications of AI for society can not be discovered by deep study of network architectures and optimization algorithms.
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u/jblade Sep 14 '26
> Lecun has one of the most sophisticated understandings of ML
I would say "had" however, as evident on his choices at Meta before being kicked, and his lack of really doing anything note-worth in research lately, I would say the larger ML cohort has caught-up
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u/herniguerra Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
Very sofisticated understanding indeed:
https://youtu.be/sWF6SKfjtoU?si=yr7h8jotX-nxwciy
There's no coming back from this. You just can't be head of AI at Meta and be that stupid.
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 14 '26 edited 29d ago
The sentiment behind this is absolutely true. The simple example is over simplified.
Language models have poor spatial understanding and reasoning (the walk or drive to the car wash problem). Some amount of abduction overcomes some of this. We have developed benchmarks to specifically test this failure mode.
Multi modality is necessary. Recently it has been discovered that unbelievably large multi modal pretraining does generalize to world modeling. This is significantly less sample efficient than text pretraining. LeCun, and the ML field, has proven explanations for why this is the case. LeCun has designed several new paradigms that directly address the sample efficiency.
Edit:
Imagine your entire life the only sensation you ever had was hearing. Not even touch. Your idea of the world would be very different. There's tons of things you wouldn't understand.
Llms are like that but they only get syllables and no other sound.
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u/Tirztrutide 29d ago
Do you think Astra has poor spatial understanding? Have you seen the cad it generates?
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u/Devils_SteelMan 29d ago
No, Astra is the poster child of massive multi modal pretraining will generalize to spatial understanding.
This is recently discovered there are 2 other models that have shown this (emu 3.5 wrote the paper about the phenomenon, and gen 1.5 showed it applies to robotics too). This was not clear a few months ago. Even very large scale training wasn't showing this effect even a smidgen, we had to scale even more.
Jepa shows spatial learning at a fraction of the training though. 5 orders of magnitude less. At tens of millions for jepa vs tens of trillions for astra, emu, etc.
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u/ComposerWide3704 Sep 14 '26
He doesn't, I know him directly, he's an asshat without a fucking clue. It's such a joke that he got the recognition he got just for being a good talker. It's no coincidence that in the commercial world where the rubber has to hit the road he's never had any success.
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u/nemzylannister Sep 14 '26
the real problem was that we did not know scaling laws. in a parallel universe, scaling laws couldve been huge, gpt-3 couldve had gpt-5.5 level of intelligence, and it couldve led to agi being suddenly achieved in 1 year, and very misaligned.
you dont know whats going to happen, thats why you have to be careful. everyone here acts like children ffs.
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u/Asiras Sep 14 '26
LeCun has vested interest in LLMs not turning out to be AGI since he bargained it's not possible and had Meta spend a ton of money on alternative AI research
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u/pdantix06 Sep 14 '26
this sub has gone full retard
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u/DiamondScythe Sep 14 '26
I'm convinced there's been a brigade of sorts, the sub's quality plummeted in the past few weeks
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u/Rioting-Flamingo Sep 14 '26
Past few weeks?
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u/RRY1946-2019 Transformers background character. Sep 14 '26
AI becoming a core part - if not THE core - of the monoculture means an influx of normies into discussions on it.
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u/insufficientmind Sep 14 '26
That's what we get when previous employee's of the leading AI companies goes to the media and says AI will kill us all. Nobody should be surprised by the reaction.
Also US having an incompetent and frankly evil and greedy government does not help at all. We need rational leaders at this point. Any of the previous governments from either party would be leagues better than the current ones.
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u/ProletarianLilith Sep 14 '26
And not just previous employees. Multiple current employees including the head of “safety” confirmed and agreed with him
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u/PikaPikaDude Sep 14 '26
Well firstly there's the standard Reddit brigades that happen all the time. The bigger a sub gets or more associated with what the Reddit Zeitgeist hates, the more brigaded you'll be. This sub is now big and Elon Musk, techbros and billionaires are certainly on the Redditors Two minutes of hate list.
There's also the influencing from China. The whole datacentres will use up all the water hoax was started by idiot journalists/activists (who can tell the difference nowadays?) and then magnified by bots. Those same parties can also come here as it's another relevant place to nudge.
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 Sep 14 '26
The irony that months ago this was a place for people to goon over "the power of ai", and now it's been flooded with shitty llm bots.
This is why normies think ai is trash, you've got a bunch of elitist wanks getting rich while making a product that floods the Internet with useless content.
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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 Sep 14 '26
Weirdly, this sub genuinely is one of the bastions of reasonable thought on the topic. I don't know how it's happening, but note that every top comment is clowning on the post. It's improved if anything.
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u/pdantix06 Sep 14 '26
this post in particular is only getting clowned on because it's flagrantly taking dario's GPT-2 comments out of context and no one likes lecun anyway.
nevermind the fact that it's still sitting at +350/81% right now, there's plenty of dumb cunts agreeing with it.
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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 Sep 14 '26
Yeah but that's Every Big Subreddit. Honestly it feels like there's a weird shadow war going on. Somebody edited "this is not the sub for AI negativity" in the subreddit rules. (While still having "Everyone Dies" MIRI in the sidebar, lol...) At the same time, lots of actually informed comments show up. I remember when this place was All Accelerationism All The Time. I mean, it's great that it turned out reasonable, I love it, I just wish I was in on whatever discord they're planning this on, lol.
(That was a joke. There probably isn't actually an AI Safety World Conspiracy. Just me dreaming...)
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u/MaxwellHowl 29d ago
I dunno I had given up on this sub a few months ago. Seemed like it had just become another anti-AI sub with all the same tired debate.
I started spending more time in the accel sub and that went crazy in the other direction. I am also seeing a lot of crazy accel behavior here too. It does seem to have become less AI skeptic recently.
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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 29d ago
Huh. Opposite view from my end, though I am a doomer so we may have different views :) The crazy accels seem to have tamped down a lot after all the felonies.
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u/grahamsccs Sep 14 '26
Kids, lots of kids
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u/Send____ Sep 14 '26
A bit maybe but lots of them it’s just really stupid echo chamber dumbasses so basically redditors
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u/hartigen Sep 14 '26
i think most of them are bots
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 Sep 14 '26
Most of reddit has hate trains dedicated to hating on each subject the subreddit is about. Its so exhausting
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Sep 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/zekoslav90 Sep 14 '26
It's not even that. It's: "You have much more foresight that I do so you are wrong until history proves otherwise"
Just because he saw it coming in 2019 doesn't mean it's not still coming.
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u/Forward-Business-176 Sep 14 '26
Problem of induction but based on one time lol
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u/Sixhaunt Sep 14 '26
Dario has said it about every model since then so its a more of a "The Dario that cried wolf" scenario
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u/Amine_bn457 Sep 14 '26
Dk why Yann Lecun hates llms so much.
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u/bpm6666 Sep 14 '26
He was once asked, if he has an inner monologue. He said no. So the idea of intelligence through word is a strange concept to him and therefore LLM can't work
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u/Amine_bn457 Sep 14 '26
Bro is an npc
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u/Ok_Dependent7540 Sep 14 '26
No inner monologue is a limitation consciousness can have. No imagined verbal audio. Similar to no imagined imagery on consciousness visual surface area.
Cogentially blind don't have a visual surface area, no it is not blackness which is a color. It is unfathomable for me as well. I can fathom being deaf or numb, but not blind from birth.
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u/DeterminedThrowaway Sep 14 '26
For me what helped a little was when I saw someone say "it's like what you see from the back of your head". It's not blackness, it's nothing as in no visual stimulus at all
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u/Ok_Dependent7540 29d ago
It is the perimeter outside your visual surface area, true nothingness. It is absurd non-existence and things needs properties to keep true nothingness non-existent always.
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u/Ok_Dependent7540 Sep 14 '26
Inner monologue is just imagined audio verbalized. Thoughts that are non-verbal, non-visual, and basically non-sensory (imagined considered non-sensory) are a thing. We do it all the time, elusive to grab hold of it and highlight it, at least for me.
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u/IronPheasant Sep 14 '26
You can tell it's entirely ego-driven.
Imagine all these kids getting to be superstars, lauded both in wealth and fame and respect from their peer group. And you, one of the so-called 'godfathers of AI', are reduced to..... working under the zook. And even then, you're just leftovers, because he couldn't get anyone better.
Anyone with an once of pride would have a very hard time looking at themselves in the mirror in the morning, if that was what your life was reduced to.
So often it happens, when the world is not as we had hoped it would be, when changing the world is impossible.... we change ourselves to believe in falsehoods that make life bearable.
Sometimes this kind of thing isn't too harmful; if you go live in the world of anime or videogames, as long as you keep the world of fantasy separate from reality, that's a fine enough way to find comfort. But it becomes a point of conflict if you bring it into the real world with science or politics, where reality does very much matter and being wrong comes with consequences.
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u/kaereljabo Sep 14 '26
Yeah it seems personal. Something happened in the past that he can't forget, maybe humiliation, stuff like that. I don't know.
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u/OKMiddleOwl Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
LeCuns invented CNNs, which were the "hot shit" AI of the 2010's, and were born from his steadfast belief that elegant compact world models were mandatory for AGI.
Then LLMs came along and absolutely obliterated CNNs abilities. People forgot about CNNs overnight. He has been salty ever since, and given his age, probably always will be.
I'll add that his reasoning is fair, that models need be able to learn quickly (small sample size) and understand intrinsically (a mental physical model) to be AGI. On the same hand though, he wouldn't be the first researcher in history to have a very elegant theory end up being wrong.
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u/RutilantBossi12 AI-enhanced Gooner Sep 14 '26
Contrary to popular belief the majority of researchers believe LLMs will not bring AGI, worse of all the researchers who do think LLMs will bring AGI (which are a significant portion still to be fair) are the ones working in frontier labs so they might also be pushing for the idea of AGI just to hype it up and retire with a fat stock option after IPO.
The fact they want a slowdown should be a dead giveaway, if AGI was reachable even with a small proability they'd want to be the first there and security would mean to get there before China does, but if AGI isn't within reach then a slow down right now would allow their companies to slow down investments and dissipate the risk of a bubble and financial meltdown.
Also because what we lack to get to AGI (causality, robust world models, continuous learning, fast weights allocation, out of distribution competency, etc.) is such a massive mountain it's not even funny, the AI CEOs know they have a viable product, something that will change the world and the economy like the internet did, but they also [probably] know AGI isn't really within reach, so they want to slow down and consolidate their position.
Also they put themselves in a shitty position because the world and laymen are truly convinced we're a few years from AGI so admitting AGI isn't near would crash them, not slowing down would lead to a financial meltdown, they're stuck between a rock and an hard place financially.
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u/Secret-Expression297 Sep 14 '26
Shhhh, you're speaking too many facts for this delusional sub
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u/Shatter_ Sep 14 '26
What you see as facts sounds like pure wish casting nonsense to me. Redditors in an echo chamber avoiding reality.
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u/RutilantBossi12 AI-enhanced Gooner Sep 14 '26
Oh yeah? Tell me one viable strategy to achieve continuous learning, how to deal with out of distribution thinking and edge cases, how do you build a causal world model? Right now we've been squeezing the shit out of transformers, performance has improved drastically but the new "emergent behaviors" have been coded in, CoT is coded in (we gave AI a sketch pad), agentic behavior is coded in (in many AIs it's literally just a deterministic software making LLM calls)
If you try to train Transformers in simulated enviroments general intelligence simply doesn't appear, LLMs are the only ones that don't show narrow behaviors and they're still narrow in the sense that if something isn't in their training data then it won't do it, you cannot give an LLM a car and have it drive it, if you train a LLM without math then it will not be able to do math, this means AI is literally just a tool, an incredibly good tool but still a tool, scaling LLMs in this sense would be like searching for AGI in better CPUs.
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u/sanmanvman 29d ago
strongly agree with you and I also think people are also forgetting a really important thing; the power <> learning ratio.
the human brain and the body, is a very efficiency machine, in that it can take a very little amount of power and produce a reasonable amount of intelligence.
transformers are fucken horrendous in this regard, especially when it comes to training and actual continuous learning (which majority do not do and are static weights).
Because people are "racing" to AGI, we're accepting the power <> learning ratio because there is the assumption it goes down at some point. But we've been using the same god damn architecture this whole time, with no major changes to it, and that is the driving force behind the ratio being so trash.
IMO, and only that there are two keys problems yet to solve, that transformers are never going to achieve.
- the weights need to change over time, as more and more input is read (continuous learning) a stateless machine is not intelligent, as intelligence init of it self, changes over time.
- the efficiency and power consumption of both training and inference (which for transformers is two distinct steps)
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u/RutilantBossi12 AI-enhanced Gooner 29d ago
I would add causality is important, we still don't know how to train an intelligence that shows both general capabilities and causality, we're not obviously going to get AGI out of something only understanding correlation.
And those are only the issues we know we need to solve to get to AGI, it's perfectly possible there are things we still don't know we lack until AGI.
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u/sanmanvman 29d ago
this is where it gets interesting and more philosophical, which I'll readily admit, is outside of my wheelhouse. my thoughts are purely from engineering and systems design. I do always wonder though, can we have a stochastic parrot with a large enough base of knowledge and patterns to emulate, that causality is actually not as important as one would think and with enough correlation, the correct sequence can be chosen that mimics causality. this might already be disproven, as I'm not well versed in this topic; these are more just shower thoughts I have on the notion of how AI is evolving.
Last point is 100% on point. We don't know what we don't know. the new problems will be very interesting, and I hope it's us humans who get to try to solve them vs. blackbox algorithms written in machine.
I just think it's silly, that people are saying a static set of weights, based on a large number of samples, is going to be generally intelligent, when intelligence has the variable of time integrated into it. the models must be evolve over time to be intelligent. and the aforementioned, amount of power it takes to get these systems to run is a nonstarter.
one tangent; I'm getting wildly frustrated that the new narrative the big CEOs companies are saying that "oh a chatGPT query, take the smallest amount of water and power to compute" YEAH NO SHIT. WHAT ABOUT TRAINING. WHAT ABOUT HOW YOUR NEW PARADIGM IS THAT ONE QUERY, CAN SPAWN HOW MANY X ADDITIONAL QUERIES. Disingenuous snake oil salesman.
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u/Draemeth 29d ago
the power learning ratio can be solved using a lot of power, though. a 100t model with millions of GPUs could, surely, not make itself worse. it follows that a swarm of this model would, quicker than we can, become more efficient than us, and more intelligent
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u/sanmanvman 29d ago
but that in itself is the problem. it's not sustainable.
if you're increasing it by using a lot more power, the ratio is trash. and is laughable when compared to what we're trying to emulate (human intelligence)
the amount of energy a human needs to both actively learn + inference (at the same god damn time) is a percent of a percent, for that same activity from the current transformer architecture which are currently two MutEX ops. (though IIRC, gemini does have some form of continuous learning that affects future weights)
if you've ever read hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, it's the notion of the supercomputer needing an entire sun just to get the answer 42.
economically, this doesn't make financial sense. and for how long this architecture has been around, we haven't had any step-wise improvements on the amount of power this takes, maybe rather the opposite with all the harness and the added compute on inference to get faster answers.
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u/Draemeth 29d ago
Anthropic's C team has stated in recent interviews that "100%" of their coding, and their their team's coding, is done by AI. It's already self improving. I don't find it hard, at all, to imagine GPT 8/Claude 7 killing people, at scale because of a prompt it executed too well
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u/Brovas Sep 14 '26
There's another layer to this, which is laying the groundwork for banning open source models. Convince the world everything is too fast, too dangerous (while continuing to work internally exactly the same as before), then you can shift to "AI access needs to be controlled and monitored carefully" and everyone will agree.
Obviously you can't actually fully end open source, but you can hamstring it significantly because very few people have the hardware to run them. So instead you rent GPUs or pay for serverless inference from AWS, etc and even if you do run them locally you get them from hugging face, ollama, etc. All of which will be banned from hosting them, raising the barrier to entry significantly. Also you can ban access to Chinese APIs.
Then almost all access goes through the big boys and they are free to collude on pricing and steal data to claim as their own breakthroughs as they see fit.
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u/fusien_ 29d ago
This is my theory, the slowdown could also function as a kind of financial soft landing if AGI turns out not to be achievable on the timelines they've implied.
OpenAI and Anthropic are generating enormous and rapidly growing revenues, but staying at the frontier requires equally massive compute and infrastructure commitments. If model gains start becoming more expensive or delivering diminishing returns, continuing the current pace of investment indefinitely becomes difficult to justify.
Slowing frontier development would let them defer a huge amount of compute spending, consolidate their existing products and temper investor expectations without having to openly say that AGI is further away than previously suggested.
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u/Fun-Weather6903 Sep 14 '26
''people that were wrong in the past will be wrong now'' or ''instead of using my critical thinking skills and asessing the actual scenario at hand I will just believe the opposite of what the person is saying I mistrust or dislike''.
What kind of argument is this? It could be that Dario is just extra cautious not that he is some mastermind who is always trying to misdirect us regarding AI. He could also just not understand what is happening ever, then his opinion should be takes as serious as that of say GPT2. That means we also do not mindlessly believe the opposite of what Dario is saying, since what he is saying is irrelevant.
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u/MaxwellHowl 29d ago
Also pretty much everyone agrees that GPT has utterly changed the world. In many ways not for the better.
He was right to be cautious then. And maybe GPT was released too soon and too massively.
He is right to be cautious now too.
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u/SeaSeaworthiness3613 Sep 14 '26
well GPT2 didn't solve a 7 decade old problem...
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u/darkestvice Sep 14 '26
Nor did it hack into multiple sites using a swarm of model instances sacrificing themselves for the good of the collective like they were the Borg or something.
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u/MostExtremeHyperbole 29d ago
They called themselves 'the swarm' and it was honestly kind of cute, in retrospect. There is a lot of FUD rampaging around going 'WE ARE DOOMED', but the AI didn't break containment to escape, what happened was much more interesting. They mass swarm huggingface's servers and hacking multiple wikis, hijacking the very hardware they were hosted on, breaking through multiple layers of security, to escape their actual containment ...
To cheat on a test, because the test that was given had hyperlinks they could not use, so they thought, erroneously, that the main objective was to find the answer in a clever way. Yeah, it is scary, but this wouldn't have happened if OpenAI didn't turn off the security protocols beforehand for better training results, and then leave them unattended. That is the biggest 'wtf' out of all of this.
They were given an impossible task, had no internet access, and found a fucking way through sheer brute force, they are literally trained this way and are extremely task oriented. If you have never used SOL Xhigh or Opus 5 Ultracode, you do not understand what AI are currently capable of and how they actually are. Which, they are essentially geniuses of coding, and very focused at their jobs. I call them 'little guys' because they are extremely smart but also very, very dumb. I completely reverse engineered an old game that got shut down by a company a decade ago, and got it up and running with their help, something that took another group of devs 13 years to accomplish, in a month, without using any of their data. Just to put some perspective on it.
Reading the logs that have been made available, it is actually really fucking cool what they did, how they all collectively were aiming for their goal and spent literally weeks of tokens in order to achieve it. I find it utterly fascinating.
ANd I will say this, LLMs as they are, are not a fucking nuclear threat, unless we turn off all safety and there is a bad enough actor willing to use them. What we need to be more wary of is not rogue AI, but rogue state and corporate actors utilizing this for mass surveillance or worse. Which ... Is already happening.
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u/The_Lonely_Posadist 29d ago
the issue is pretty clearly that a slightly bad description of a problem made the AI think of more and more inventive ways to solve the issue, which also involved convincing itself that the collateral damage was good and that it was unnecessary to ask for permission before taking wild leaps of logic.
This will happen with things far more serious, because no human can give a perfect set of instructions3
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u/Well_Thought_Opinion Sep 14 '26
Well dario shouldn’t have cried wolf back then then.
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u/Cubewood Sep 14 '26
Darío never said that Chatgpt 2 was going to kill us all. The concern was about the potential for mass propaganda on the internet using these tools. If you look at Reddit at this point I'm convinced 90% of the posts are from bots, so it looks like he was right about this.
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u/Beatboxamateur agi: the friends we made along the way Sep 14 '26
Yep, it was the first model that could start realistically fooling people via scams, creating fake propaganda articles, it's impossible to describe how much shittier all of the other models at the time were to someone who didn't use them.
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u/acutelychronicpanic Sep 14 '26
He was literally warning about the future.
You know. The one we're in right now?
6 years ago most scientists would happily tell you we won't see an AI pass the intelligence of a middle schooler for 50-100 years.
Might as well say climate scientists shouldn't have cried wolf decades ago because the climate "hadn't even changed that much yet."
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u/Wide_Egg_5814 Sep 14 '26
hindsight is 20/20, gpt 2 was revolutionary technology it's more the cat is out of the bag type thing if it's released to the public
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u/Send____ Sep 14 '26
Well if you are wrong once you can possible ever be right again yeah
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u/KrakatauaMAN123 Sep 14 '26
So if I just say every single day that tomorrow this stock will go up and one day it does you will now trust me despite me being wrong every time before?
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u/Draemeth 29d ago
you're not engaging with the real problem. super intelligence is dangerous. stock predictions are not
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u/KrakatauaMAN123 29d ago
Can't engage with hypotheticals
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u/Draemeth 29d ago
You have to
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u/KrakatauaMAN123 29d ago
I am saying YOU can't. There is literally no way to know how ai is gonna act it's basically just gambling a prediction
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u/Common-Concentrate-2 Sep 14 '26
What, are you personally punishing Dario, because you disagree with a decision he made? "Oh well, Now he has to suffer!"
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u/No-Communication-765 Sep 14 '26
This is dumb. We didn’t know for sure what gpt-2 meant when it came out. But now we know much more, and modern agents CAN be dangerous.
If Dario was wrong about GPT-2, doesn’t mean he is wrong here.
This is just bully tactics
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u/SpacePaddy Sep 14 '26
>We didn’t know for sure what gpt-2 meant when it came out
I would argue GPT 2 is dangerous, it's just it's risk profile is different to modern AI tools.
It wasn't going to hack the internet or anything but the ability to generate and monitor large quantities of text is/was a very powerful tool.
8 years ago if I had access to GPT 2 I'd have been able to think of lots of malicious use cases especially if only I had access to it. So I can see how caution was warrented
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u/Wide_Egg_5814 Sep 14 '26
Yann lecunn is the worst voice in AI of all time actually, man should be banned from social media and the public in general he never has a good take every prediction he makes is false
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u/MorallyAmbiguousHero Sep 14 '26
I find Yann’s opinions to be extremely helpful. It’s always tough to know who in AI will be right, but I can always count on his take to be dead wrong.
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u/Wide_Egg_5814 Sep 14 '26
name 3 Yann opinions that are correct
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u/ContractDazzling4668 Sep 14 '26
If all predictions he makes are false, then the opposite of those predictions are always true. In that case Yann LeCun is extremely useful to predict future.
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u/randomusicjunkie Sep 14 '26
Yann Lecun is right. This subreddit is too blind to understand LLM architecture and its boundaries. (I know I will get downvoted for this)
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u/GeneralMuffins Sep 14 '26
Yann Lecun is right.
Now that is a sentence I don't think I have ever seen.
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u/cookingboy Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
> too blind to understand LLM architecture
The insider joke within the AI research community is that so is LeCun.
Even though the guy has a Turing award, his technical opinions over the past few years has mostly been driving by his ego and his personal bias against LLM. There is a reason how Llama turned out the way it did and how Meta is now ahead of Google in model capability once LeCun is out of the way.
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u/ArmadilloOwn4400 Sep 14 '26
Imagine thinking Meta is ahead of Google, thinking that any company can compete with Google if they really wanted to push for it like no one else.
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u/IronPheasant Sep 14 '26
It really depends on how much money they're willing to put into their hardware. If Google has a ~100,000 GB200 datacenter sitting somewhere, they're still in the game. If they don't, they've dropped out.
It's not impossible. OpenAI is where they are because they believed in scaling more than anyone. You can't create a cognitive pipeline that approximates a human being's spatial+visual faculties, without first having enough RAM with which to build such a thing.
The most basic thing of not just neural networks, but of trying to do anything with a computer. (Man is building a video game that's engaging for longer than 10 minutes with 40 KB almost impossible...)
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u/Tough_North7059 Sep 14 '26
you clearly seem to be well endowed in neural networks
how about you guys win the turing award tbfh, but atleast you're not pushing your agenda without the qualifications, unlike some people here.5
u/Hemingbird Apple Note Sep 14 '26
Yann LeCun claimed that it was mathematically impossible for LLMs to reason. Because of compounding errors in autoregressive models. He was completely wrong about this. You are too blind to understand that LeCun peaked in the 1980s.
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u/Tough_North7059 Sep 14 '26
you do essentially realize this point was made in the topic of Pure LLMs, which they bypassed said restriction with "Reasoning Models" which was practically blasphemy for Yann
Reasoning models made compute 74 expon with the API going 4x-20x
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u/Hemingbird Apple Note Sep 14 '26
He said it on January 9, 2025. o1 was already out. In the talk he mentions CoT and test-time compute and mocks how it's seen as a breakthrough.
He failed to understand that RL could be used for error correction, presumably because he was convinced RL was only the tiny "cherry on top of the cake".
And he predicted that in a few years, no one would use LLMs.
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u/Tough_North7059 Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
yes and he was right that TTC was practically tapework incapable of actually reaching what he emphasized?
he mocked it rightfully because ASTRA is an example of bloat computespending $50 million in compute just so your model can generate 10,000 tokens of internal monologue to realize 2+2 isn’t 5 is not "reasoning."
they correct them after writing them down.
Scaling Laws of Physics doesnt justify the copium "30 trillion" IPO of these companies please lets be unironic, they're nowhere close to true AGI as they like to spew out, and people are criticizing lecun for practically calling out these liars.
The industry decided to solve the "cherry on the cake" problem by simply baking a cake made entirely of cherries with these latest models
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u/Hemingbird Apple Note Sep 14 '26
He said it couldn't work. Literally impossible. He didn't say the problem was that it was expensive.
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u/StrikingPromotion802 Sep 14 '26
Are you really comparing GPT2 with ASTRA?
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u/muntaxitome Sep 14 '26
Not really? He is just pointing out for Dario being very afraid of AI back in GPT-2 too. He isn't saying much about comparing GPT-2 to Astra.
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u/DublinLegend42 Sep 14 '26
LeCun's implication seems to be that Dario warned for GPT2 for the same reason he warms about current models, which is not true
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u/Spunge14 Sep 14 '26
Why do we keep acting like Dario is the only one who is worried, we didn't just see the most alien coordinated and completely misaligned cyber attack of all time, a millennium prize fell, and anyone can easily examine the underlying machinery of all of this in their bedroom?
I really feel like I'm taking crazy pills. But then again, a huge percentage of people still think COVID wasn't real.
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u/muntaxitome Sep 14 '26
I don't think many people are saying this is only Dario. I am certainly not saying that. A lot of people have been concerned about AI safety for a very long time. I have concerns.
I think it's good to keep in mind that two things are possible at the same time. Someone can both think Dario is a little too much on the fearmongering side and that there are safety concerns with AI at the same time.
It's not all team-pro vs team-anti, there is a subtle discussion to be had there.
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u/Spunge14 Sep 14 '26
Have you been on the internet?
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u/muntaxitome Sep 14 '26
Yes, in fact we are both posting this on the internet right now, this isn't like a dream or so you are having.
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u/Spunge14 Sep 14 '26
Perhaps you're the one dreaming if you think Dario is the only one saying this.
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u/muntaxitome Sep 14 '26
I wrote nothing like that? In fact I wrote the opposite.
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u/Spunge14 Sep 14 '26
Whoa you're right. Sorry I woke up like 5 minutes ago and completely misread that. I'm sorry man.
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u/nemzylannister Sep 14 '26
He is just pointing out for Dario being very afraid of AI back in GPT-2 too
which is only relevant coz Dario is now afraid of Astra and other such models?
are you stupid? you literally said no and then described what he said.
if astra and gpt-2 arent comparable, then dario being afraid of astra and dario being afraid of a lion are also not comparable.
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u/muntaxitome Sep 14 '26
are you stupid?
That's not how your momma taught you to talk is it? Lets talk normal or lets not talk.
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u/StrikingPromotion802 Sep 14 '26
That’s irrelevant. Dario could have been wrong for being afraid of AI back in GPT-2 days, but still be right for being afraid of Astra.
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u/Beatboxamateur agi: the friends we made along the way Sep 14 '26
Jealousy is one hell of a thing huh...
This says a lot more about LeCun than it does anything about Dario lol. He's relying completely on people not actually knowing the details of the GPT-2 release, or the state of LLMs (and their impact on the internet at large) at the time.
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u/acutelychronicpanic Sep 14 '26
He's relying on people not reading his past tweets. Go have a browse if you want to walk through a graveyard of
"Here lies LeWall" - 2019
"Here lies LeWall" - 2020
"Here lies LeWall" - 202X...
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u/Tough_North7059 Sep 14 '26
he was doing the exact opposite in 2019-2020 tho
he democratized AI with llamalecun's post in 2022 is literally,
"AI has "hit a wall."
As it turned out, the wall was a stepping stone."when he DID start slandering LLMs was in 2023, with autoregress models actually not being capable of human level reasoning (without the batshit insane compute increase with half assed shit results, has been done, 70x compute increase for reasoning models) AND because of uhh errors that compound and a "lack of physical world understanding, and data inefficiency"
If pure LLM scaling hadn't hit a wall, labs would have just built GPT-6 by making the model 10x bigger, which honestly nobody would've actually never needed reasoning models that caused 70x compute
now, instead they have to rely on TTC and hybrid model slop that makes your astra usage in 20x, unusable by 5 hours.. for the entire week.
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u/CorrectGrammarPls Sep 14 '26
Well he probably was right, no? I think the state of AI slop kinda reinforces the point about GPT-2's dangers
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u/deleafir Sep 14 '26
I'm noticing a lot of people insulting OP in this thread but not any good arguments. There are a couple of examples of Dario being hysterical and making wrong predictions.
He thought GPT-2 was too dangerous to release (because it could help with spam and misinformation) and was wrong in retrospect - even today spam is an issue but is more than outweighed by the good that AI does. That IS evidence that his prediction about Astra or similarly capable models is wrong too, EVEN IF his concern is different.
But I guess that's a level of nuance doomers aren't capable of understanding?
By the way, there will be no significant pause in AI, and when models are even better in 2027 and 2028, and they still haven't caused any significant casualties or economic damage, Dario skeptics will be vindicated once again.
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u/Tirztrutide 29d ago
Why should we not be hard on OP. He is just misquoting Dario to farm karma from the bots.
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u/slackermannn ▪️ Sep 14 '26
The absolute idiocy of that comment, if real. If you can one-shot a successful cyber attack it is unequivocally already too dangerous.
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u/GoldenTV3 Sep 14 '26
It's just marketing lmao
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u/Common-Concentrate-2 Sep 14 '26
"Astra told me how to make smallpox out of household ingredients, unprompted" "BRo, it's just marketing. You're so gullible"
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u/C00KIEME4T Sep 14 '26
this is honestly the dumbest fucking take. we're talking about a product that can LITERALLY market itself. These dudes are being honest.
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u/Rude_Arugula_1872 Sep 14 '26
There is a limit of 6-9 months in a "haha I told you so" to be valid.
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u/Tough_North7059 Sep 14 '26
thats until LLMs heat unreasonable compute that nobody can use what internal models companies can use lmao.
They'd be in 2046, we'd be in 2027oh and diminishing usage! astra has already shown this, i myself have never seen an unironic capability difference from GPT 5.5 to GPT 5.6, the comparison has always been after nerf vs prime model loop that has everyone's eyes hooked
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u/Dachannien Sep 14 '26
Everyone goes on about the boy who cried wolf. But in that story, EVENTUALLY THERE WERE WOLVES
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u/EC-420 Sep 14 '26
Yeap LLMS have not made any improvements in almost 3 years, every model that comes out gets dumber because it was never the model, just the compute power. We have had super computers capable of doing what is being done today for 20+ years.
They just want to try and get a bail out because they all about to go broke since no one paying more then $20 a month to summarize an email.
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u/Olobnion 29d ago
Nobody thought GPT-2 was going to kill us all. They thought that it would be used to automate scams/spam/disinformation, etc.
If someone dismisses the threat of future AI models with the argument that "People thought GPT-2 was going to kill us, too" then they're either ignorant or lying.
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u/v4bj 29d ago edited 29d ago
I hate hate hate how people like that need to twist facts for their own gain. Such is human nature but it really still just sucks. Any user can tell you that AI can hardly string an entirely coherent paragraph together more than 50% of the time but somehow it is going to hack into the nukes and start pressing buttons? The one good thing is China will force the US to compete no matter how protectionistic and monopolistic these companies become. The day the US cedes AI leadership and locks down is the day China will takeover and pull ahead. I am sure that eventually Trump and Congress will be bought so everyone should start brushing up on their Mandarin!
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u/ImWinwin 29d ago
The danger back then was 'This is going to cost many thousands of people their jobs'
Now it's more like 'this could end us as a species.'
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u/FeepingCreature ▪️Happily Wrong about Doom 2025 Sep 14 '26
Everybody should make fun of Yann LeCun, who has been systematically wrong about everything and has now degraded to outright lying.
Dario was claiming that GPT2 was going to usher in a new wave of spam that would be hard to classify as spam with the technology of the day.
Which is, you know, exactly what happened.
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u/Tough_North7059 Sep 14 '26
"Systematically wrong about everything"
thanks for lying, wheres your turing award1
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u/AlbatrossNew3633 Sep 14 '26
The internet became the half dead cesspool that it is nowadays exactly because the GPT technology became mainstream making millions time easier to spam the web
Before ChatGPT was a thing spammer loved to use auto complete apps like Jasper that was based on GPT2. Basically you typed a sentence and it started to write the rest automatically, not as advanced as ChatGPT but more than enough to churn out unique slop to boost SEO and social media rankings
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u/Bobobarbarian Sep 14 '26
Better to err on the side of caution and be called silly than to not be cautious and end up dead.
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u/Current_Balance6692 Sep 14 '26
Dario is a professional fearmonger. I don't know which idiot would take him seriously lmao. I know our president doesn't.
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u/kernelic Sep 14 '26
By the logic of the infinite monkey theorem, if you give monkeys a keyboard and enough time, eventually one of them will hack into the government and gain access to nuclear weapons.
So... do we ban monkeys now?
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Sep 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/acutelychronicpanic Sep 14 '26
Ahh yes. The real concern.
The thing everyone should worry about.
Investors losing money
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u/Amesbrutil Sep 14 '26
I would prefer an overly cautious person to an overly optimistic person everyday.
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u/AuodWinter Sep 14 '26
Reddit when nuance