I am no one. I have greatest respect for all Turing award winners.
But one thing I am wary is that LeCun - while special and excellent - is just as many others, working at a place where "AI" is already used to "engage people up" - it is just the nature of the business if you are in the engagement business. And your "AI" will gladly help you in all kind of subtle ways. What is also nice is that it's uncharted territory now, so you can freely roam - and engage the heck out of your audience.
And LeCun is just - as a "neutral" scientist - just doing his part.
Let me ask you, why aren't more workers "happy capitalists" and praise this way of living? Why aren't the warehouse workers more happy? Or the people soon displaced by computers and algorithms? Why aren't they look forward to a life of less chore and more free time?
Why do so many people protest against climate change? Why is it ok for corporations to externalize costs? Why is all the considered good?
I'm all for competition and fierce fights, but let just not forget that we live in a "society" and not in a box, everyone for themselves.
Yes, true - many societies are using this configuration for hundreds of years.
My issue is not based on morality, but on the fact that we as humans are capable of reflecting on our existence. And that each of our lives is determined by a large amount of luck.
I could be born smart, ill, rich, poor and so on. Does some accidental property give me more rights and opportunities than others? My western net worth would allow me to retire right now in many parts of the world - but did I earn this privilege? Of course not, it was pure accident.
My issue is that people take a huge amount of lucky accidents as a justification of all kinds of power grabs and entitlements. And capitalism just has the potential to magnify this effect - e.g. by letting the "smart" and "lucky" control the "less smart" and "less lucky" and call it all "natural" and without alternative.
My problem is, I'm kind of anti-capitalist, to make it short. Labor and capital and not just production factors, but they constitute a power relationship (and often a quite asymmetric one).
I cannot bring myself to "invest" in something or believe that "my money works for me" - that's delusional. Money does not "work".
People get all upset about the stance, but all I am saying is that everyone wants to profit off someone else' work and I do not think that's the best way forward. Especially not in an era, where labor overall will decrease in value (we will continue to automate more and more) - which just means poverty for anyone w/o capital (it's that simple).
Edit: Also, I'm not speaking as a "loser" of this system - but on track to the first million - it's just that I can imagine another world and so many people take the "capitalist framework" as a given - which it just not is. There are ways to think about society in a more nuanced way, without losing all the competitive niceties of capitalism.
We ended up here, because a) the promise of easy to use structured data - that is inherent in data processing systems - has not been fulfilled: you have to scrape HTML to reconstruct some relational table, and b) information, despite being almost free to transmit in large amounts today, is treated as if it were a physical good, and each copy costs money. There is just lots of money in there, because our economic system looks more backwards than forwards.
I stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years ago - not that I was a frequent shopper before that. I feel it is the same capitalistic dilemma all over again: exploit technology and as opposed to make technology a force for liberation use it as a weapon against labor and call it innovation.
We are in the beginning of our probably very long dystopia, where only the rich will be able to live a life off total surveillance and the rest will be sucked out of all remaining living traces for survival.
The only rule I live by is that I do not try to exert power over anyone that I would not wanted to be subjected to myself. Period.
Germany has free schools, universities, low cost good child care, a relatively good health infrastructure, and more. Some regions do not even need debt any more to finance all this. The high taxes do not just evaporate, but sure could be used more efficiently.
If I'd have the choice between US and Germany, I'd probably prefer the old Europe model.
One thing to keep in mind: With every request-response cycle for the probably upcoming paid service, you are feeding constant data points to a commercial entity. Basically your typing habit, the project development over time, the bugs, the fixes, all will be recorded.
Think about it, one well paid profession in the grips of capital siphoning off valuable, highly intellectual work (by using "open source" already), repackaging it and the selling it back to the people it aims to replace.
Imagine a million lawyers' days being recorded in 60s intervals - including what they type, the files they have opened, etc. - how long would it take to encode the average lawyer into a hdf5 file? How many lawyers would be fine with that kind of assistance?
If that's not ingenious, then I do not know what is.
Call to action: Programmer, wake up.
Edit: Just to address some typical rebuttals - I'm all for progress and cool toys, but I'm all against monopolies and mega-corps that control and monitor every aspect of your life.
I'm all for moving forward, but Copilot just seems to be a bad idea, amplified.
What I want is careful, thoughtful, knowledgeable people, who have learned and honed their skills over years in various areas and can come up with creative, maintainable solutions to complex problems. This is not something you autocomplete. If it would be, we could autocomplete 80% of all jobs tomorrow.
I don't want code monkeys on steroids. But maybe I'm to far off Silicon Valley.
I have to yet have people tell their most pressing need is auto-scaling. It's not, it's a straw man - and true, if you are Google or Facebook - but 90% of companies won't need that at all.
1. The developer experience. This is crucial, developers want programmable things, everywhere. You can reap the benefits of automation.
2. Vendor lock in and platform power. There are three large players today and they add bit and pieces all the time; leading to vendor lock in. The cloud is even for mid-size projects much more expensive than raw hosting or owning the hardware.
Today, I would treat cloud as an expensive, but useful starter - to get you going, to try things out quickly. I would not bet my business on it, especially not, if I were a large company.
Ergo: Building everything in a "cloud native" mode restricts you where you can go from day one. Not good.
Yes, the wrongness is partly associated with the direction these things come from.
OpenAI leadership knows that there is just sooo much value to capture in more automation, even if it takes billions to get there. They also know, that there is sooo much money around not knowing what to do and so much excitement in the field generated by bystanders, not understanding a single thing.
Perfect setting for ride and reap.
I repeat: There is nothing open about this, the research scientists are being used in order to propel just another get rich sooner-than-later scheme (how should they know better, they are innocent scientists). Happy bulldozing what is left of society in order to generate profits and to shove the AI BS down the managerial class, because that's all just how the system works.
And, if know all that, you can exploit it, hacker.
But one thing I am wary is that LeCun - while special and excellent - is just as many others, working at a place where "AI" is already used to "engage people up" - it is just the nature of the business if you are in the engagement business. And your "AI" will gladly help you in all kind of subtle ways. What is also nice is that it's uncharted territory now, so you can freely roam - and engage the heck out of your audience.
And LeCun is just - as a "neutral" scientist - just doing his part.
Why can't he not work at FB? Money? Data?