Yann LeCun

In mid-2024, Yann LeCun vocally opposed California's SB 1047 AI safety bill. He argued that making technology developers liable for bad uses would 'simply stop technology development' and would 'certainly stop the distribution of open source AI platforms, which will kill the entire AI ecosystem.' He called the bill based on an 'illusion of existential risk pushed by a handful of delusional think-tanks' and warned that without open-source AI, 'AI start-ups will just die.'

Yann LeCun played an instrumental role in convincing Mark Zuckerberg to release Meta's Llama 2 AI model as open source in July 2023, making it freely available for commercial use. LeCun publicly argued that open-source AI is essential for cultural diversity, democracy, and preventing dangerous concentration of power in proprietary AI systems, stating 'the future has to be open source, if nothing else, for reasons of cultural diversity, democracy, diversity.'

Throughout 2023-2024, Yann LeCun was one of the most vocal critics of AI existential risk narratives. He called concerns about AI existential risk 'preposterous' (June 2023) and 'complete B.S.' (October 2024), publicly disagreeing with fellow AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. He argued the AI alignment problem has been 'ridiculously overblown' and that it is 'way too early to regulate' AI to prevent existential risk. He debated Eliezer Yudkowsky on alignment feasibility and estimated P(doom) at less than 1%.

In 2023, Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng publicly argued against the widely-signed open letter calling for a moratorium of at least six months on training AI systems more advanced than GPT-4. LeCun stated 'calling for a delay in research and development smacks me of a new wave of obscurantism.' He argued that pausing development was counterproductive and that AI safety concerns were being overblown to justify restricting research.

In June 2020, after the PULSE AI model depixelated Barack Obama's photo into a white face, LeCun argued that 'ML systems are biased when data is biased' but that 'learning algorithms themselves are not biased.' Timnit Gebru and other researchers criticized this framing as reductive, arguing it ignores systemic issues in AI development. The exchanges became heated, and LeCun signed off Twitter on June 28, 2020, asking 'everyone to please stop attacking each other' and specifically asking people to stop attacking Gebru.