OpenAI targets criticism from Yann LeCun. © Getty Images / SOPA Images
ChatGPT, a not very advanced AI? That’s what Yann LeCun, the chief scientist in charge of artificial intelligence at Meta, thinks he knows. The manager spoke during a Zoom meeting organized by Collective[i] Forecast.
ChatGPT “not particularly innovative”
Writing emails or articles, problem solving, code generation, text summarization… After going online at the end of 2022, ChatGPT has been a huge success with the general public and professionals. But for Yann LeCun, GPT-3 (the model behind ChatGPT) and the services developed by OpenAI are not very impressive. “In terms of the underlying techniques, ChatGPT isn’t particularly innovative. There’s nothing revolutionary about it, even if that’s how it’s perceived by the public. It’s just that it’s well designed, it’s nicely done”he launched blandly, relayed by our colleagues from ZDNET.
OpenAI wouldn’t even be particularly advanced compared to other AI labs. LeCun says the organization relies on several technologies already used in the past. “It’s not just Google and Meta, but there are half a dozen startups that basically have technology very similar to this. I don’t want to say it’s not rocket science, but it’s really shared, there’s no secret behind it”says the head of Meta.
Soon AI on Facebook?
The AI linked to GPT-3 would thus be based on Transformer, a neural network architecture for language understanding launched in 2017 by Google. In addition, the reinforcement learning technique, used by OpenAI to develop ChatGPT responses, was also pioneered by Google and its DeepMind unit, says Yann LeCun.
After having let loose on the Microsoft-funded organization for a long time, Meta’s AI director took the opportunity to teaser projects currently in development within his firm. LeCun promises that Meta will offer text generation in the still unknown future, “but also aid for creation”including “generative art”. And run: “I think it’s going to be a big thing.” These technologies could help “12 million shops that advertise on Facebook” to produce personalized campaigns.
Finally, Yann LeCun did not fail to justify in his own way the delay taken by the big firms in terms of artificial intelligence. “You might wonder why there aren’t similar systems at Google and Meta. And the answer is that both Google and Meta have a lot to lose by coming up with systems that make stuff up”he shouted, laughing.