Meta's chief AI scientist says "ChatGPT is not innovative".

Submitted by ZaKodiak t3_10oxdjy in singularity

What happened? So, there has been a lot of excitement around OpenAI's ChatGPT which generates natural-language responses to human prompts.

But what if... it's not as amazing as we all think it is?

Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, argues that the program is not innovative. He also states that similar technology has been developed by many companies and research labs, and that ChatGPT is composed of multiple pieces of technology developed over many years by many parties.

(sounds salty to me... and I like my cookies sweet!)

But maybe Yann has a point!

What's happening now? ChatGPT is perceived by many as a unique and innovative program. People are using it everyday to make their lives easier. So, no matter what, ChatGPT is still awesome. 

What's happening next? It's unclear what will happen next in terms of the development and perception of ChatGPT. However, it can be expected that as AI technology continues to evolve, there will be further advancements on what is possible with this tech.

It's likely that ChatGPT will face many spin-offs and competitors this year. 

Exciting times!

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Primo2000 t1_j6hd34t wrote

Might be not exciting or innovative for guy who has access to latest google AI and compute but it is revolutionary for millions of peoples who are not meta chief AI scientist, so unless google come up with product available to general public they should stfu

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666vampiric t1_j6hex3r wrote

It's kind of funny how braindead easy it is to create as a product. All you have to do is make a paid API. You can leave the innovative applications to the people who will pay you if you want. But they're so mogged down by AI safety they can't even do that.

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sumane12 t1_j6hj4z5 wrote

It had a million users in its first week, it's impossible to call it "not innovative" because if it wasn't, someone would have already done it.

This is a case of "it's not my product, therefore it's a bit shit"

It might be using outdated tech (although I'm not sure what timescales we are working with to describe it as outdated) but it's 109%, by definition, innovative.

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bacchusbastard t1_j6hn28q wrote

Haha, so true, but why do people think that one million users is a lot? Imagine if it were exciting as minions?

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sumane12 t1_j6hnmhp wrote

Lol

The whole 1 mill in 1 week is the fastest ever adoption of any technology ever. It got to the million user level before twitter, Facebook, YouTube, any of the social media platforms. So it's a pretty big deal in terms of investors.

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Utoko t1_j6i4agu wrote

They had a million in a week and now they are already at 10 million daily users despite being down 50% of the time.

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bacchusbastard t1_j6i5azo wrote

I see, thank you. Exciting times.

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DonOfTheDarkNight t1_j6ie64w wrote

bro is that really you in your profile pic?

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bacchusbastard t1_j6isj3h wrote

Yes, I am authentic. also I read that wow only has about a million daily users to I guess chagpt having ten million is better than I thought.

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Smellz_Of_Elderberry t1_j6kpvbf wrote

Chatgpt is free. It's also very easy to pick up and put down. I can't wait for it to get implemented in video games..

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ziplock9000 t1_j6hzd9b wrote

Popular != Innovative

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sumane12 t1_j6i244k wrote

Why is bitcoin number 1 by market cap? It's technology is arguably worse than other crypto coins.

Here's the definition of innovation

make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. "the company's failure to diversify and innovate competitively" introduce (something new, especially a product). "we continue to innovate new products"

By definition, if something is popular, it has to be innovative, people don't just en masse jump on the bandwagon of stuff that's been done for years.

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Smellz_Of_Elderberry t1_j6kpl98 wrote

Innovation != useful

If your innovation isn't useful in the real world, it's not even really an innovation.

Popular innovation = useful innovation.

You build a combustion engine, it is impossible to mass produce, and only 3 people have them.

I take your engine and make one that is simpler and easier to mass manufacture and cheaper to produce. Yours might be better, more innovative, but mine is the only one that's actually useful to society.

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JohnMcafee4coffee t1_j6hvegr wrote

What the fuck has meta offered anyone innovative

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94746382926 t1_j6p7ajh wrote

The more I hear this Yann LeCun guy talk the less I like him.

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JohnMcafee4coffee t1_j6hvhau wrote

They are just upset that chat gpt is disruptive to their predatory shit product

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TinyBurbz t1_j6j2kw3 wrote

>upset that chat gpt is disruptive to their predatory shit product

Mans got jokes.

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ziplock9000 t1_j6hzfpz wrote

Sounds like Meta's Chief is a bit salty.

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Thatingles t1_j6i7lrm wrote

Zuckerberg hit an all-time home run when he created facebook, the exact right product at the exact right time to catapult him into the billionaire class. But since than, what has facebook or meta come up with? They have bought companies, but I don't see them as innovators.

Also, LeCun is on record as saying many current approaches to AI are essentially dead-ends. So I'm not surprised he is talking down the competition, but until meta release their own product it's starting to look like they are the ones going down the wrong path.

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joshuaklinger t1_j6iklkg wrote

This whole thing is just people talking past each other.

ChatGPT is a little "old" for AI. The problem is companies like Google and Meta were too pussy to keep theirs in the wild. Due to cost and moderation issues.

ChatGPT took a blank check from MSFT to launch it, moderate it, and gain all of that sweet sweet brand recognition.

Teams on Meta and Google are pissed that they have had to keep theirs behind the scenes running algorithms (you know, contributing to revenue), so they had to go and say something salty. If they want to prove that ChatGPT is not "innovative" then they need to come out and give us all free access to their tools like Open AI did.

While what they are saying is technically correct, the term "innovative" here is misleading. Because to really innovate you need someone to actually feel the positive results from your invention. So this guy is wrong about whatever innovative AI he might have access to. It's not more innovative, it's more advanced.

Just one man's two cents.

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CertainMiddle2382 t1_j6hui4a wrote

The way I see it is that we will end up having AI gods taking care of our warp drives and some experts will still explain that they are not truly “intelligent” but just large transformer models doing massive matrix math…

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jalanst t1_j6i1wzw wrote

Still waiting for meta's AI though

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MrEloi t1_j6i8akg wrote

Just a bad loser.

Move right along - nothing to see here.

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vivehelpme t1_j6o0mzr wrote

Yann LeCun was programing neural networks before before most of the people who replied in this thread was even born, he made optical character recognition work on hardware that makes your smartfridge looks like a supercomputer. He doesn't say this from a sore loser point of view but to understand where he come from you need to look at what he's actually saying.

He didn't say chatGPT sucks.

He didn't say meta have something better.

He said it's "not particularly innovative". Which is true.

  • Transformers models have been around since 2017.
  • Language models are more numerous than anyone can keep track of.
  • Dialogue oriented fine tuning have been made before.
  • Virtually all names in big tech are training large language models.

Why is chatGPT doing so well then?

  • It's a big model, which is hardly new, but it's accessible and usable for free.
  • openAI have a good media traction, so they make a splash even when they show off closed models.

So when LeCun says it's "not particularly innovative", is he really wrong? Is being a known name and giving out free stuff^((arguably they are datamining the public for additional training data, which makes the free part a little bit less free)) considered innovative?

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Ashamed-Asparagus-93 t1_j6p3i85 wrote

I understand what you're saying as this was more or less my reaction to what he said but from a devil's advocate perspective it is innovative due to the presentation and availability.

If me you and 50,000 other guys created magic mirrors that make you look younger and you're the only one who releases it to the public then in a way you're the innovative one even if I've been studying magic mirrors for 20 years.

Maybe I'm wrong but the one who can release a product to the masses is the innovative one simply because no one else has been able to do it yet.

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REOreddit t1_j6m76ir wrote

Can you imagine a chatbot made by Facebook/Meta that would lie as confidently as ChatGPT? That would be a PR nightmare for them, and that's the whole reason they don't have one in the wild. People still remember Microsoft's bot Tay experiment on Twitter.

Meta and Google have AI technology on par or superior to that of OpenAI. All top companies that do AI research publish papers, so it is not exactly a secret how advanced they are.

LeCun is not comparing ChatGPT to what is freely available to the general public, he is comparing it to what is available in the top AI research labs.

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enkae7317 t1_j6m8d5i wrote

I agree and I think this is the reason WHY they're not releasing their product yet. They remember Tay getting racist and xenophobic and all sorts of crazy within a day or two of being released to the public. They saw that and were like "nope", we aint gettin that bad press.

So they spend years and years moderating their internal chatbot and being too scared to release it publicly, because they know it'll go racist or whatever. They will take years upon years to build failsafe after failsafe and before they know it--a competitor (ChatGPT) released theirs first and now they're scrounging up, picking up scraps to try and get SOME footing in the door before getting forgotten in the annals of history.

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Lawjarp2 t1_j6jd4cg wrote

Jelly in the belly cause normal people can use it too.

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dr_set t1_j6k1eay wrote

Well, can mr. envious points us to any previous AI that we can use that does the same as ChatGPT? I tested all the coding ones, for example Github Co-pilot. ChatGPT blows them out of the water.

And it's not just the quality of the responses, equally important it's ease to use. Things like Co-pilot made me jump a lot of hoops and the client was limited dog-sh*t.

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NeedsMoreMinerals t1_j6khgd1 wrote

Maybe the innovation isn't in the technology itself but the accessibility OpenAI provides to the technology allowing anyone in the world to leverage

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Rezeno56 t1_j6kt5cm wrote

"Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, argues that the program is not innovative. He also states that similar technology has been developed by many companies and research labs, and that ChatGPT is composed of multiple pieces of technology developed over many years by many parties."

Well then, why aren't you releasing it. If LeCun thinks ChatGPT isn't innovative, well where are the other chatbots like ChatGPT that is considered innovative to him. Why companies haven't release it yet.

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EOE97 t1_j6m0r2n wrote

More innovative than any shit Meta has put out to the general public so far.

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