Elon Musk Expresses Support for Google's Hassabis in his Dispute with AI Researcher Yann LeCun

Another feud has flared up between Demis Hassabis and Yann LeCun, thereby breathing fresh life into the possibilities of Artificial General Intelligence. Artificial General Intelligence, also abbreviated as AGI, has been in the limelight ever since the ChatGPT blast in 2022. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of the DeepMind AI company, has only launched a verbal attack on Yann LeCun, an NYU professor, former head of Meta AI, and well-known as the ‘godfather of AI’.

Dispute arose when Yann LeCun gave an interview for a podcast, where he said that the idea of general intelligence was rubbish, to say the least. He also said that human intelligence is specific and has nothing to do with general issues regarding the world around them physically and that people's idea of AGI is an illusion.

"But, as Lecun continued, "people seem to be so flexible, human intelligence is not as good as we are oblivious to, we are not able to tackle all the problems that we encounter every day." To this, Google DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, remarked, "Yann was simply wrong in saying this, confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence."

"The thing about generality is that, theoretically, within the Turing machine model for the definition of computability, its architecture is capable of computing or learning anything within some time bounds and some amount of memory space, and this applies to the human brain or models of AI which approximate a Turing machine," said Hassabis.

The significance of this is that Hassabis’ insight is that simply because one cannot do all things, this does not mean that there is not a use for something such as general intelligence. Again, predictably, mention of words is not overlooked by other leaders in this field, this time Elon Musk. Thoughts of Hassabis are shared again, saying that Musk declared that Hassabis was right.

There is an issue with AGI, which is:

As Yann LeCun says, “Artificial General Intelligence” or “AGI” is “a kind of intelligence that could match or even surpass human intelligence, according to a definition used by the organizations OpenAI or Google, et cetera, a system capable of dealing with brand new situations, adapting to unexpected events, or even improvising in real time, rather than relying for solutions solely on patterns discovered through learning, when, if ever, such a feat occurs.” “Artificial General Intelligence ” or “AGI,” is a definition for a type of intelligence that "corresponds to or even exceeds human intelligence combined" as a definition from the artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI, and Google, referring to a type of intelligence that is "capable of solving entirely new problems, adapting to However, as pointed out by Le Cun, all this is far from being a reality at present. This is because, despite being able to solve complex tasks, including passing highly difficult exams, as evidenced by chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, these are still far from reaching human intelligence. This is due to their highly specialized nature that lacks the adaptability that human intelligence possesses.