Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-is-not-particularly-innovative-and-nothing-revolutionary-says-metas-chief-ai-scientist/

by jonbaer • 3 years ago

78 177 3 years ago

zdnet.com

visarga20• 3 years ago

Technically, he is right. But OpenAI was the first to find the winning formula and make it famous.

KrazyButTrue2• 3 years ago

What do you mean by "winning formula" in this sentence?

consumer451• 3 years ago

Not the parent, but to me it generally means 1 million (likely non-dev, regular people) users in 5 days.

For me personally: I have had success asking for code snippets and general brainstorming in areas which are not my forte, all the while using a very nice and clean UI.

Zanneth• 3 years ago

Making a product and shipping it.

soperj3• 3 years ago

This is very much people seeing the Apple Lisa(and/or Mac) for the first time. It had all been done better in the labs at Xerox over a decade earlier. No one got to use it though.

nightski2• 3 years ago

To me it's childish, and I have no idea why Yann decided this needed to be shouted on Twitter. I've lost a lot of respect for him over this.

soperj3• 3 years ago

I think if you read the headline it seems childish. His main point is that Google/Meta couldn't really release this, since the accuracy is really really poor.

visarga20• 3 years ago

Well, the transformer was invented at Google, language models were decades old. But scaling it was not done before, and preparing the dataset at this size, and babysitting the model so its loss doesn't explode during training - all were innovations that required lots of work and money to be achieved, so we can just copy the same formula without redoing all the steps.

arp242• 3 years ago

According to the article: "LeCun made his remarks about OpenAI in response to a question during the colloquium posed by New York Times journalist Cade Metz. Metz asked if Meta's AI team, FAIR, which LeCun built, will ever be identified in the public mind with breakthroughs the way that OpenAI is."

It seems to me "well actually, ChatGPT isn't really the breakthrough you think it is" is an appropriate response. He wasn't dismissive of ChatGPT and even praised it to some degree.

jancsika• 3 years ago

Show me the AI chat system from a decade ago that could hallucinate a git repo.

Edit: let me be more careful:

Show me the AI chat system from a decade ago that wasn't specifically designed to hallucinate git repos, but would hallucinate a git repo in response a detailed natural language prompt. It should have been good enough in its output to cause the user to write more prompts in an attempt to gauge whether the AI system is querying the internet in realtime to generate its response.

jchw2• 3 years ago

Decade ago, definitely not. But the answer to that question, time aside, is, well, GPT-3. No doubt ChatGPT is better, but it does seem like a decent bit of the improvement was UX related, since with the right prompts people have shown similarly miraculous output from GPT-3.

Of course, I'm pretty sure the quoted person is referring to the fact that Google and others likely have similarly capable LLMs already that they simply won't release the models for. I can see the argument that new architectures and designs can be innovative, but that simply being the one to throw a million dollars of compute time into training is much less so, if that's the kind of argument.

babypuncher2• 3 years ago

While Xerox did it first, I think it's a stretch to say they did it better than the Macintosh.

soperj3• 3 years ago

No it really isn't.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-original-Macintosh-compare...

msikora• 3 years ago

Google is the new Xerox - tons of cool tech that nobody gets to see besides white papers and articles. And the only real product that makes money is the search engine that may get disrupted very soon by newcomers using tech based on Google's own research.

stackedinserter• 3 years ago

"Dropbox is just rsync + svn"

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

mattnewton2• 3 years ago

Sure, the ideas could be old (in ml research timeframes) but it works and they shipped it. It’s most people’s first exposure to a lot of innovative ideas that make up LLM at scale.

I agree with his assertion that the only reason other people haven’t seen this out of Meta or Google is that they “have a lot to lose” from putting out bots “that make stuff up” - that’s the root of Google seemingly losing the narrative war I think we’re seeing here. Not sure how to get them to work through that fear.

visarga20• 3 years ago

they “have a lot to lose” from putting out bots “that make stuff up”

2023 should be the year of AI validation. For starters, we could extract facts from all the training examples (trillions) and organise them in a knowledge base. Where there is inconsistency or variation, the model should learn the distribution, so later it can confidently say a fact is not in its training data or is controversial. Note that I didn't say the model should find the truth, just the distribution of "facts".

We can add source reputation signals to this KB to improve its alignment with truth. And if it is controversies we want to know, we can look at news headlines, they usually reference facts being debated. So we can know a fact is contested and by who.

Another interesting approach - probing the model for "truth" by identifying a direction in the latent space that aligns with it. The logic being, even when the model is deceptive, it has an interest to know it is not telling the truth to keep the narrative consistent. So we need to just identify this signal. This is also part of work for AI alignment.

I hope this year we will see large investments in validation, because the unverified outputs of a generative model are worthless and they know it. At the very least hook the model up with a calculator and a way to query the web.

password112• 3 years ago

Google seemingly losing the narrative war I think we’re seeing here.

Google doesn't care about the narrative war. They care about getting sued by the EU.

They can put out a similar model whenever they want. The just don't want to, because the thing about AI research (vs., say, social media) is there's no first mover advantage. The best model wins and there's no network effect to bolster incumbents.

mattnewton2• 3 years ago

The just don't want to, because the thing about AI research (vs., say, social media) is there's no first mover advantage.

That’s true and I am not worried for Google in the slightest. However, once a tool is good enough, both the branding and use of it becomes somewhat sticky. It’s why people still call any tablet an iPad, and it’s one of the reasons even if a large search engine launched tomorrow people would keep using google for a long time. The problem isn’t being first, it’s if they crack changing consumer habits while google is biding their time.

rockemsockem• 3 years ago

A tweet isn't worth a news article. Geeze.

browningstreet2• 3 years ago

That seems to be a lot of news articles these days.

I'm not particularly excited by ChatGPT, but the mercenary in me is impressed at the investment from MS it generated. From a business perspective, it accomplished "and profit!". Whether it pays dividends or reaches a richer/more-sophisticated milestone is to be seen.

Personally, I think it'll muddy and flood the "bullshit" & truthiness layer pervading news, social media, auto-generated Youtube content and blogs, our digitally mediated life, etc. It's essentially the next level "bot", and those aren't held in high regard, as effective as they are. Ultimately, they're noise.

I'll go a step further: ChatGPT feels more like VR & crypto than it does.. say, cloud.

visarga20• 3 years ago

It is a tool, like a knife. You can use it to reword your rough notes into an article, or to generate spam and fake news. It is a great idea fountain, but you need to filter everything with your own head to make anything useful of it.

cl4210• 3 years ago

It's amazing how many researchers underestimate the importance of UX and design.

Personally, seeing non-technical people using prompts for the first time -- and getting results that make sense -- is so incredible. Their eyes light up, they are surprised, and they want to keep playing with it. Amazing!

A sizeable part of the population just got access to an incredibly complex AI model and can play with it. What a collective experience.

ryanSrich2• 3 years ago

It's amazing how many researchers underestimate the importance of UX and design.

Yes. Also the fact that ChatGPT's UX and design leaves much to be desired. They could add/improve the product in so many obvious ways. I wonder if they either 1.) don't care, or 2.) have plans to, but are holding off until they take on a subscription fee.

cl4210• 3 years ago

What would you change to the UX and design to make it even better?

Turing_Machine4• 3 years ago

Isn't there an API?

PartiallyTyped2• 3 years ago

It's quite fascinating how information retrieval and search engines have evolved..

From trying to teach people how to google via "I am feeling lucky", to using language models for ranking, to building LLMs to better adapt to user queries and move beyond keywords, to having arguably useful chatbots that can synthesize responses.

I am curious to see what the future holds. Maybe an AI that can anticipate our queries?

visarga20• 3 years ago

I also saw the "LLM as database" metaphor. Up until 2020 we had databases in the backend, UI in front, now we can have LLMs in the backend.

smoldesu3• 3 years ago

Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Most people don't understand that ChatGPT has no idea what they're talking about. It lacks it's own thought and heuristic patterns, and only gives you the most-likely response to your prompt. People don't know that though, so they think the Mechanical Turk is actually playing chess.

I mostly agree with the headline here. ChatGPT is hardly any more innovative than a Markov chain.

visarga20• 3 years ago

and only gives you the most-likely response to your prompt

That "only" carries a lot of weight on its back.

abm53• 3 years ago

thought and heuristic patterns

I’m not sure these are well-defined enough terms to make this claim.

canjobear• 3 years ago

Responses like this are highly predictable in response to prompts about ChatGPT.

lostmsu5• 3 years ago

The question is are we any more innovative than Markov chains.

buescher• 3 years ago

Except that the Mechanical Turk is actually playing chess - there is no hidden chess master.

fsloth• 3 years ago

"hardly any more innovative than a Markov chain."

Innovation is not invention. Innovation includes combining pedestrian concepts in novel ways. ChatGPT has the best ux and richest corpus of any markov chain I've ever used. It fits my bill of innovation combining sevaral things into a dang appealing product.

rafaelero4• 3 years ago

Most people don't understand that ChatGPT has no idea what they're talking about.

I wonder why people keep saying this. Is it some type of psychological defense to future AI displacement?

hbrn3• 3 years ago

ChatGPT has no idea what they're talking about. It lacks it's own thought and heuristic patterns, and only gives you the most-likely response to your prompt

Funny thing is, same could be said about lots of people. Try listening to any political debate.

Which leads me to believe that the thing that's missing from AI is the same thing that we miss in those political debates: ability to explain and justify your own thought process.

As long as AI is a blackbox, we won't consider it to be a real intelligence.

Swizec• 3 years ago

ChatGPT is hardly any more innovative than a Markov chain

A smartphone is hardly any more innovative than the ENIAC. And yet ...

Do not underestimate the power of making tech useful and accessible. The lightbulb means nothing without the power grid after all.

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

If it weren’t that remarkable, how come Siri, alexa, and whatever google calls it’s unused voice assistant are so useless? If it were not a substantial advance, why are chatbots so useless? The reality is, if Alexa had half the ability to “understand” as chatgpt it wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating. It’s not like Amazon, apple, and google haven’t dumped metric tons of investment into these things.

Y’all simply have lost the ability to be amazed.

cwillu2• 3 years ago

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators

    But the essay brings up another connotation: to simulate
    is to pretend to be something. A simulator wears many masks.
    If you ask GPT to complete a romance novel, it will simulate
    a romance author and try to write the text the way they
    would. Character.AI lets you simulate people directly,
    asking GPT to pretend to be George Washington or Darth Vader.

[…]

    This answer is exactly as fake as the last answer where it
    said it liked me, or the Darth Vader answer where it says it
    wants to destroy me with the power of the Dark Side. It’s
    just simulating a fake character who happens to correspond
    well to its real identity.

[…]

    The whole point of the shoggoth analogy is that GPT is
    supposed to be very different from humans. But however
    different the details, there are deep structural
    similarities. We’re both prediction engines fine-tuned
    with RHLF.

    And when I start thinking along these lines, I notice that
    psychologists since at least Freud, and spiritual traditions
    since at least the Buddha, have accused us of simulating a
    character. Some people call it the ego. Other people call
    it the self.

idopmstuff• 3 years ago

I don't think he's underestimating the UX/design piece, I think it's just outside of the scope of what he's talking about. It seems pretty clear to me that his statement is talking about the underlying AI technology (which makes sense given his background).

And in any case, I wouldn't call anything about the UX or design here innovative - it's obviously a huge improvement in terms of usability, but a chat UI is a pretty well-established thing.

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

Then what left is there to explain why this is so much different from the well-established stuff?

cl4210• 3 years ago

I think the idea of a "prompt" is actually pretty cool. I never saw that framing prior to GPT-3 and I think it reframes the entire idea behind what a model does and how you interact with it.

visarga20• 3 years ago

Nobody talks about the dataset. Yes, the model was not innovative. But why hasn't anyone equaled OpenAI yet? Maybe they innovated on data engineering.

sandworm101• 3 years ago

> using prompts for the first time -- and getting results that make sense -- is so incredible.

Years ago it was possible to insert prompts into Google and get results that made sense, results that were meaningfully tied to the information you requested. The young people today who missed that time think it magic.

cl4210• 3 years ago

I think this is fundamentally different because you can play with it, and people want to play with it.

Google isn't a playground -- it's much more utilitarian. You go there when you need to find a doctor in Seattle, or to research politics in Poland, or something. You get results which are great, but you don't need to stick around.

GPT-3 and ChatGPT allow you to spend time playing with the system and having fun with it[1]. I think this is what makes it so viral and interesting to people.

[1] https://10millionsteps.com/ux-ai-gpt-3-click

lostmsu5• 3 years ago

Yes, but the kind of responses were different.

visarga20• 3 years ago

That wonder might not be lost forever. Can't we have access to an old index and cached web pages?

scifibestfi• 3 years ago

And/or underestimate the importance of shipping.

cl4210• 3 years ago

100%. I think Hugging Face is awesome here as well.

The # of times I've tried to clone a GitHub repo and run a model on my own only to get 50 errors I can't debug.... :)

MisterPea• 3 years ago

This is the bigger thing over UX/design.

Someone on twitter likened this to when Xerox invented the mouse, but Apple/Microsoft shipped it with their PCs

zwieback• 3 years ago

Agreed. He did say that it was "well put together and nicely done", though.

random3• 3 years ago

Researchers point of view is based on their area of research and that's fair and expected.

Yann LeCun compares ChatGPT in the context of the related research. Imagine a ChatGPT equivalent that memorizes many questions and does a brute force strategy for an answer. It may "look" magic, but there's nothing magic about it. We all accepted that this is the case with Blue Gene - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_(chess_computer)

What's different here?

Productization and usability are difference concerns here and Yann LeCun is not a usability researcher. Granted, that doesn't mean usability/accessibility doesn't impact research outcomes.

cl4210• 3 years ago

OK, I'll defend the research, too.

OpenAI's really interesting approach to GPT was to scale the size of the underlying neural network. They noticed that the performance of an LLM kept improving as the size of the network grew so they said, "Screw it, how about if we make it have 100+ billion parameters?"

Turns out they were right.

From a research perspective, I'd say this was a big risk and it turned out they were right -- bigger network = better performance.

Sure, it's not as beautiful as inventing a fundamentally new algorithm or approach to deep learning but it worked. Credit where it's due -- scaling training infrastructure + building a model that big was hard...

It's like saying SLS or Falcon Heavy are "just" bigger rockets. Sure, but that's still super hard, risky, and fundamentally new.

zozbot234• 3 years ago

But ChatGPT does not use brute force search to look for an answer. It interpolates among the answers in its training set. I.e. in Yann LeCun's analogy of a cake, interpolation or unsupervised learning is the cake; direct feedback on each single data point or supervised learning is the icing on the cake; and general feedback of the "how I am doing" sort or reinforcement learning is the cherry on top. Now LeCun is just saying that the cake is a lie, and leaving it at that. I don't think this is a helpful understanding.

version_five• 3 years ago

chatGPT is innovative in the way the iPhone was innovative. That, of course can be market winning, but it's dangerous, especially for businesses and investors, to get caught up in hype that there is some new "AI" out there that can do things we previously couldn't

Gigachad• 3 years ago

Can you point to any product where I could do what chatgpt does before chatgpt? Feels like we just leapfrogged from dumb markov chains to something incredible that provides real value.

Turing_Machine4• 3 years ago

Indeed. This reminds me of the people who were unimpressed by the iPod because there were other MP3 players already on the market.

Sometimes "making the first X that doesn't suck" is a lot more important than "making the first X".

time_to_smile• 3 years ago

He's not wrong. The key ingredient in ChatGPT is not brilliance but capital. It takes a lot of money not just to do the raw training but to get all the data together and process everything.

There's no break through insights that make ChatGPT work, just a lot of consolidated wealth.

The hacker part of me finds AI less and less interesting for this reason. We're seeing what the limits of pouring resources into the problem are. The results are cool, but I think we'll very soon see progress bound since we're using most of the data we can and it doesn't look like adding even more parameters to these models might not yield that much of result.

But this shift in AI means it's increasing something programmers consume rather than produce.

As far as interesting AI goes, I found the series of posts on stuff people were doing with Prolog that showed up during the last month much more interesting.

woah• 3 years ago

There are a lot of things that require an amount of processing power that the average person doesn't yet possess. This doesn't mean that they aren't interesting.

50 years ago you would have said "these computer things aren't interesting, only big institutions and corporations have them".

sharemywin2• 3 years ago

I find it the opposite. There were a lot of projects I didn't have the time to work on and got bored to fast learning. So, now I can tell chatgpt to build it for me. and I only have to debug the 1 or 2 things it can't do. I built a blogging platform, a voice based chatbot using gpt3, something that takes blog article and trims out all the garbage html so only the basic html is left. created a python api, and called it from shared hosting using php. something that trims the times out of youtube captions so I can post it into chatgpt to give me an outline. I just tell it what I want the function to do and it does it.

It's helped me way up my own personal productivity and creativity.

visarga20• 3 years ago

When language models run out of more trillions of words to train, there is one way ahead - we need to generate more. But wait, you might say, garbage in garbage out. It won't work.

Normally it wouldn't, but we add an extra ingredient here. We get a validation signal. This is problem specific, but for code it would mean to integrate the LM with a compiler and runtime so it can iterate until it solves the task, step by step. For other tasks it could mean hooking the AI to simulators, games and robots to solve tasks. It is also possible to use LLMs as simulators of text.

Basically doing Reinforcement Learning with a Language Model and not just for human preferences, but for problem solving on a grand scale. Collect data from problem solving, train on it, and iterate. It costs just electricity, but LLMs can make their own data. Anthropic's Constitutional AI which is RLAIF - reinforcement learning from AI feedback is proof it can be done.

alephxyz• 3 years ago

He's pulling a Schmidhuber.

karmasimida• 3 years ago

He will change his tune if ChatGPT uses CNN

jti107• 3 years ago

well he is right that the techniques used have been around. but this is the first mainstream AI that most people outside of the AI community have been impressed with and found useful to do real world stuff

lofatdairy• 3 years ago

I mean, ChatGPT isn't even innovative for OpenAI's team. In terms of raw language capabilities it's not much more effective as GPT-3, which passed the HN Turing test almost a year before. Some of the credit goes to the fact that Dall-E 2 got everyone looking at OpenAI (and wrt Dall-E I'm personally not aware of any comparable work done anywhere else), a lot of the credit goes to the fact that OpenAI was willing to put it out there, and the work they did to make ChatGPT much safer really doesn't get acknowledged enough (on release, ChatGPT would refuse to produce potentially hateful/harmful text, and eventually a lot of the workarounds got patched as well).

It's probably not fair to characterize the discourse around ChatGPT as treating it as a revolutionary bit of tech, lay people are taking note because 1) people they know are actually using it and 2) the interface really is intuitive - literally anyone knows how to use a chatbot.

sharemywin2• 3 years ago

Putting it behind a login and captcha was the brilliant part.

lostmsu5• 3 years ago

In terms of raw language capabilities it's not much more effective as GPT-3, which passed the HN Turing test almost a year before.

No, its ability to follow instructions is much better than GPT-3.

robga• 3 years ago

At least it shows Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus can agree on some things. Thankfully someone has gone full circle and had ChatGPT construct a rap battle between those minds:

https://mobile.twitter.com/k_saifullaah/status/1602073411077...

uptownfunk• 3 years ago

This just reads as someone being bitter for not having developed it themselves.

cma2• 3 years ago

It is notable that LeCun didn't credit Schmidhuber's labs' fast weight programmers research here and mostly focused on individuals and labs that got the Turing award alongside him.

civilized• 3 years ago

Schmidhuber's labs' fast weight programmers research

What does this refer to?

password112• 3 years ago

Full quote:

"In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative," said Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, in 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."

november84• 3 years ago

So one is a bit salty no?

It's not free from error but what it's able to put together is pretty great...

remote_phone• 3 years ago

Lots of salty researchers are shitting on ChatGPT meandering every single person I know is shocked. If this isn’t so innovative why didn’t they release something sooner?

KrazyButTrue2• 3 years ago

If you actually read the article he answers your question directly. If you are too lazy to scroll to the bottom here's a link to a tweet: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1617908306420600833?s=20&t...

yesenadam• 3 years ago

Be kind. Don't be snarky. ...Edit out swipes. ...Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

drcode• 3 years ago

Yann's tweets on this are pretty funny. I would flippantly summarize them as: "Don't get me wrong, the openai people are great. All I'm doing is educating the media, who have the mistaken belief that chatGPT is good"

https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1617921903934726144?t=2wZZ...

lostmsu5• 3 years ago

Please don't put in quotes something that is not a direct quote.

cryptonector2• 3 years ago

> I would flippantly summarize them as: "..."
Please don't put in quotes something that is not a direct quote.

What part of "I would flippantly summarize them as" was unclear? Or was that comment edited?

swatcoder• 3 years ago

I think what’s really being emphasized here is that ChatGPT is an first generation product without much of a novel technology moat compared to what others with capital can deliver.

Microsoft will soak this work up as a pillar of their own AI assistance tech, but the other big tech firms (and probably some startups) are positioned to try to leapfrog what we see here, now that the market has been demonstrated.

In the language of tech history, ChatGPT is the Lycos or Altavista to some not-yet-launched Google.

mshake2• 3 years ago

Sounds like somebody's job depends on convincing people there's a good reason he didn't build it first.

rcme• 3 years ago

AI researchers tend to have blinders when new techniques are released that don't fit their previous experience. For instance, perhaps the specific architecture of ChatGPT isn't that innovative (although I think it is), but training such a large model on so much data is innovative. Clearly this is going to become the norm going forward.

Just as a personal anecdote. I worked on a ML research team at a FAANG in the early 2010s, just as NNs were becoming popular. Everyone on the ML research team had come to prominence before NNs, so they all specialized in different areas of ML. Nearly every researchers there treated NNs like some fad that would pass and thought they wouldn't be much better than the current techniques. How wrong they were... Of course, they're all working on NNs now.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

LeCun confuses the idea invention with that of innovation. Revolutions don't happen because suddenly there's a new idea, but because of one that catches on.

https://www.wired.com/insights/2015/01/innovation-vs-inventi...

I think he also confuses his jealousy with insight.

__seka__• 3 years ago

Sometimes the innovation lies within the simple fact of how well known things are combined in order to create (good) products.

"Not particularly innovative" is not really of concern. Besides OpenAI most likely received the media attention they wanted.

Looking forward to the products Meta is going to release soon.

tonymet• 3 years ago

In it's current iteration ChatGPT is more overhyped than crypto , and that says a lot

dayeye2006• 3 years ago

He thinks the eng work behind that makes the model training and inference possible is not so impressive as well...

andrewdubinsky• 3 years ago

They talked about ChatGPT by name in almost every one of my kids classes. Deep whatever may be further ahead, but no one knows the name of that thing.

Everyone else is playing catch up now.

seydor• 3 years ago

It seems he s trying to say something that is technically correct, but exactly at the wrong time. It s going to be a lot of backlash if you go against the hype wave that we are riding. Better to explain in a more nuanced way how chatGPT managed to become so popular despite being an incremental improvement of fundamental findings of the past few years.

People love it because it understands language, every time and without fail. So what if it spits out lies, this thing makes people happy, which is the value at play here

boto33• 3 years ago

Zuck probably just massaged him: Yann we should be cool as ChatGPT.

ACV001• 3 years ago

I think he just switched team and now he's on the Facebook twitter marketing team.

SillyUsername• 3 years ago

Sounds like bitter lemons to me from a team that's getting grief from Zuck for being shit and not getting there first or having the sense to.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"

xnx• 3 years ago

Useful >> Innovative

georgeburdell• 3 years ago

Ivory tower type calls good engineering ‘not particularly innovative’

Yann LeCun: ChatGPT is 'not particularly innovative'

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