EP20: Yann LeCun - part 1/11

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (Assistant Professor) 00:13.690

hi anne and welcome to the information bottleneck and i have to say this is a bit weird for me like i've known you for almost five years and we've worked closely together but this is the first time that i'm interviewing you for a podcast right usually our conversations are more

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (Assistant Professor) 00:33.610

like yan it doesn't work what they should do

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (Assistant Professor) 00:38.160

OK so even though i'm sure all of our audience knows you i will say yana kun is a turing award winner one of the godfathers of deep learning the inventors of convolutional neural networks founder of metals fundamental AI research lab and still their chief AI scientist and the

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (Assistant Professor) 01:04.190

professor at NYU so welcome

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 01:08.520

pleasure to be here

? (?) 01:10.520

yeah and it's a pleasure for me to be anywhere near you i have been you know in this industry for a lot less time than either one of you doing research for a lot less time so the fact that i'm able to publish papers somewhat regularly with ravid has been an honor and to be able

? (?) 01:32.670

to start hosting this podcast has been even more of one so it's really a pleasure to sit down with you

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (Assistant Professor) 01:39.960

yeah so we'll try like congratulations on the new startup you recently announced that after twelve years at meta you're starting a new startup advanced machine intelligence that you focus on world model and so first of all how does it feel to be in the in the other side going

Ravid Shwartz-Ziv (Assistant Professor) 02:02.190

from a big company to starting something from

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 02:06.070

scratch well i co founded companies before i was you know involved more peripherally than than this new one but you know i know i know how this works what's unique about this one is a new phenomenon where there is enough hope from the part of investors that you know AI will have

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 02:28.990

a big impact that they are ready to invest a lot of money essentially which means now you can create a startup where you know the first couple of years are essentially focused on research that just was not possible before like you know the only place to do research in industry

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 02:45.830

before was in a large company that was you know not fighting for its survival and basically had a dominant position market and had a you know long enough view that they were willing to to fund long term projects so from you know history the the big labs that we remember like

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 03:09.190

bell labs belong to AT and T which basically had a monopoly yield telecommunication in the US you know IBM had a monopoly on big computers essentially right and they had a good research lab xerox as a monopoly on photocopiers and that enabled them to park did not enable them to

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 03:26.430

profit from the research going on there but that profited apple microsoft research google research and fair at meta and the industry is shifting again fair had a big influence on AI the AI research ecosystem by essentially being very open right publishing everything open

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 03:54.190

sourcing everything with and with tools like pythorch but also like research prototypes that a lot of people have been using in industry so we caused other labs like google to become more open and other labs to also kind of publish much more systematically than before but what's

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 04:12.030

been happening over the last couple of years is that rosso 's labs have been kind of climbing up and becoming more secretive and that's certainly the case i mean that was the case for a penny i several years ago and and now google is becoming more closed and possibly even meta

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 04:35.200

so yeah i mean it was it was time for the type of stuff that i'm interested in to kind of do it

? (?) 04:45.110

outside so to be clear then does ami advanced machine intelligence plan to do their research in the open

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 04:56.080

yeah upstream research i mean in my opinion you cannot really call it research unless you publish what you do because otherwise you can get easily fooled by yourself you know you you come up with something you think it's the best thing since sliced bread OK if you don't actually

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 05:14.510

submit it to the rest of the community you might just be delusional and i've seen that phenomenon many times you know in lots of industry research lab where there's sort of internal hype about you know some internal projects without kind of realizing that other people are doing

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 05:33.360

things that actually are better right so if you if you tell the scientists like you know publish your your work first of all that is an incentive for them to do better work that is more you know whether methodology is kind of more thorough and the results are kind of more

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 05:51.710

reliable the research is more reliable it's good for them because very often when you work on a research project the impact you may have on product could be months years or decades down the line and you cannot tell people like you know come work for us don't say what you're

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 06:11.070

working on and maybe there is a product you will have an impact on five years from now like in the in the meantime like they can't be motivated to really do something useful so if you tell them that they they tend to work on things that have a short term impact right so if you

Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist) 06:26.430

really want breakthroughs you need to let people publish you can't do it any other way and this is something that a lot of the industry is forgetting at the moment