Of the three "godfathers of AI", Yann LeCun is the only one who is not concerned about the dangers of AI. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Ftechnology-65886125
He disagrees with his fellow godfathers that AI is a risk to the human race.
Apple’s new paper on GSM-Symbolic shows that today’s best language models crumble when a gradeschool math word problem is re-phrased -- even if the logic is identical. It echoes 1969, when Minsky&Papert proved that a singlelayer perceptron could never learn XOR.
That blockade vanished in 1986 with backprop and nonlinear hidden layers. My bet: LLMs won’t need two decades to cross the reasoning gap. Why? Agents that call scratchpad Python or GraphRAG pipelines already externalize formal reasoning, turning the model into a planner rather than a prover.
Look, I’m thrilled Vox can read an SEER plot and notice that smoking, screening, and HPV vaccines matter (slow clap). But before we crown Big Tobacco lawsuits and Gardasil as the sole saviors of humankind, can we maybe glance at, oh, the last half-century of environmental regulation?
What about the asbestos bans that cratered mesothelioma in post’70s construction cohorts? 84% risk reduction -- ring a bell? What about Chile and Taiwan slashing arsenic in drinking water and watching bladder and lungcancer mortality do a Wile E.Coyote cliff plunge two decades later? Or the Mercury & AirToxics Standards that took nickel, chromium, and friends down by 80% -- something the EPA’s own Section 812 analysis credits with thousands of avoided cancer deaths?
But sure, let’s keep peddling the tidy narrative that medical tech alone bent the mortality curve. Those radon-mitigation building codes? Irrelevant. Beryllium and benzene exposure limits? Yawn. Apparently if the benefit isn’t measured in ninefigure pharma revenue or a primetime Super Bowl ad, it doesn’t make the Vox word count.
Pro-tip: pathology doesn’t care whether the carcinogen came from Marlboro Country or your municipal tap. Policy matters, and not just the ones that poll well on Twitter.
Could be related to what was predicted mid-20th century: that the Earth's crust will dislodge from the mantle and, due to weight imbalance, rotate 80 degrees placing the North Pole and South Pole near the equator, over the course of half a day (yes, leading to winds greater than Mach 1).
Books on the subject:
* The Adam and Eve Story, A History of Cataclysms by Chan Thomas - The Lost First Edition
Wikipedia article: Cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis: Earth crustal displacement hypothesis
Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.