# Yann LeCun on AGI and AI Safety

Yann recently gave a presentation at MIT on Objective-Driven AI with his specific proposal being based upon a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture.

He claims that his proposal will make AI safe and steerable, so I thought it was worthwhile copying the slides at the end which provide a very quick and accessible overview of his perspective:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/a3afc4c768bb321486c3b27ed4ab0c3de95fa30beaa56a39.png)

Here's a link to the [talk itself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqXLJsmsrk&list=PLKemzYMx2_Ot1MZ_er2vFiINdJEgDO8Hg).

**Comments**

What does he mean by cat-level, dog-level ect? This slide may help[^m1pzkibadfq]:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/fe60e1359f7cc14d8b762de7680ebea8bdc1ac996250c73a.jpeg)

I find it interesting how he says that there is no such thing as AGI, but acknowledges that machines will "eventually surpass human intelligence in all domains where humans are intelligent" as that would meet most people's definition of AGI.

I also observe that he has framed his responses to safety on "How to solve the alignment problem?". I think this is important. It suggests that even people who think aligning AGI will be easy have started to think a bit more about this problem and I see this as a victory in and of itself.

It's worth noting that he agrees with many AI safety folk that auto-regressive models are uncontrollable, he just thinks they aren't powerful enough to be a threat[^ne7lhqmagk]:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/2467ef7753271f00f69a4fc5925ab8a89b6683acacbef9b6.jpeg)

Adam Jones' [post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jKCDgjBXoTzfzeM4r/what-does-yann-lecun-think-about-agi-a-summary-of-his-talk) provides a longer summary of why he doesn't expect much from LLMs.

This leads him to think superhuman AI alignment [isn't an immediately pressing issue](https://x.com/ylecun/status/1651451901567746051):

> Worrying about superhuman AI alignment today is like worrying turbojet engine safety in 1920... Making AI safe is going to happen as with every new technology (e.g. cars, airplanes, etc): it's going to be a process of iterative refinement. And again, getting that slightly wrong may hurt some people (as cars and airplanes have) but will not wipe out humanity. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, just like making jetliners as reliable as they are today hasn't been easy. But making it sound like it's an unsolvable problem is, at the very least, extremely premature, and most likely just false. But regardless, until we have a semi credible design, we are discussing the sex of angels.

**Further resources:**

*   [*Is Yann LeCun Strawmanning AI x-risks?*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gYwfkjK8vsowfDkZu/is-yann-lecun-strawmanning-ai-x-risks)
*   Adam Jones on [*What does Yann LeCun think about AGI?*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jKCDgjBXoTzfzeM4r/what-does-yann-lecun-think-about-agi-a-summary-of-his-talk)
*   [Transcript and Brief Response to Twitter Conversation Between Yann LeCun and Eliezer Yudkowsky](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/transcript-and-brief-response-to)
*   Steven Byrnes' skeptical [comments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C5guLAx7ieQoowv3d/lecun-s-a-path-towards-autonomous-machine-intelligence-has-1) on his proposal for building autonomous machine intelligence.

[^m1pzkibadfq]: From Mathematical Obstacles on the Way to Human-Level AI via Adam Jones' post. 

[^ne7lhqmagk]: Also from the Mathematical Obstacles talk.