Yann LeCun, pictured at Ecole Polytechnique during a talk, has shot down the unique aspects of ChatGPT and other chatbots as nothing new. (Source: Wikimedia Commons via Barande Jérémy/EP)

Meta’s AI Head Scientist Lecun Dismisses Vaunted Chatbot Tech as Old News

Yann LeCun has popped the chatbot balloon that has been expanding throughout print and electronic media for the past few weeks. If you aren’t familiar with Lecun, he is the head of AI over at Meta Corp. He is featured in an article from zdnet.com this week.

Much ink has been spilled of late about the tremendous promise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT program for generating natural-language utterances in response to human prompts.

The program strikes many people as so fresh and intriguing that ChatGPT must be unique in the universe.

Scholars of AI beg to differ.

 “In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative,” LeCun said at a small gathering of press and executives on Zoom last week. “It’s nothing revolutionary, although that’s the way it’s perceived in the public,” said LeCun. “It’s just that, you know, it’s well put together, it’s nicely done.”

It is perceived as pretty important by execs over at Microsoft who announced this week that they will be investing  $10 billion in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Lecun went on to list other tech corporations that have equal technology as OpenAI.

“It’s not only just Google and Meta, but there are half a dozen startups that basically have very similar technology to it,” added LeCun. “I don’t want to say it’s not rocket science, but it’s really shared, there’s no secret behind it, if you will.”

LeCun was an invited speaker for a 90-minute talk hosted by the Collective[i] Forecast, an online, interactive discussion series that is organized by Collective[i], which bills itself as “an AI platform designed to optimize B2B sales.”

LeCun is the winner of the 2019 Turing Award for contributions to computer science, the equivalent of computing’s Nobel Prize, along with MILA’s Bengio and University of Toronto professor, and Google fellow, Geoffrey Hinton. The three helped pioneer today’s deep learning era of AI.

This is a light interview/article that allows a very highly-placed tech director to give his honest and unredacted comments about the exciting chatbots that are sparking news stories trending everywhere.

read more at zdnet.com