Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun at IIT-Delhi; calls for new model architectures

Addressing concerns about AI safety, Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun dismissed fears of intelligent systems dominating humans.

This event was presented by IIT Delhi, in collaboration with the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India and META and produced by Teamwork Arts. (Source: IIT Delhi)

Meta’s Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist, Dr Yann LeCun, on October 24 participated in a panel discussion at IIT Delhi.

Dr Yann talked about his vision for the future of AI and its intersection with human capabilities. During the panel discussion titled ‘From Neural Mimics to Smart Assistants – A Journey into AI’s Next Frontiers’, Dr Yann emphasised the need for a rethink of AI architectures, the advantages of open-source, and India’s unique potential in the AI landscape.

While welcoming Dr Yann, IIT Delhi Director Prof Rangan Banerjee spoke about the Institute’s initiatives in human-AI interface research and the Centre for Healthcare—a collaboration between the Government of India, AIIMS, and IIT Delhi aimed at advancing healthcare through Artificial Intelligence. Challenging the current approaches to AI development, Dr. Yann urged for innovative architectures beyond large language models (LLMs). He argued that current AI paradigms are insufficient to achieve true human-like intelligence.

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“We are not going to reach that stage by using the current paradigm and just making it bigger; we need essentially new architectures like objective-driven architecture,” he said.

Addressing concerns about AI safety, he dismissed fears of intelligent systems dominating humans. He stated that AI’s purpose is to empower. “The future of AI in my opinion is a future in which everyone will be walking around with an assistant digitally like smart glasses.” he said, humorously adding, “It’ll be like walking around with three smart people working for you.”

Talking about India’s role in development of AI, he said: “The training of the big models is to be distributed. India has an important part to play in this because of the size of the population, the diversity of cultures, and value systems.”