Google DeepMind's CEO calls out Meta's AI chief over human intelligence debate
Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) and Yann LeCun (former chief AI scientist of Meta) are clashing online about what makes human intelligence special.
Hassabis called LeCun "plain incorrect" for saying our smarts are just a specialized illusion, not truly general.
He posted, "Yann is just plain incorrect here, he's confusing general intelligence with universal intelligence."
Hassabis backs the power of human brains—and AI
Hassabis argued that the human brain is "the most exquisite and complex phenomena we know of," able to learn almost anything with enough time and memory.
He pointed out that humans invented everything from chess to jet planes, showing how adaptable we really are.
He also compared both brains and advanced AI models to Turing Machines—systems that can solve a huge range of problems if given enough resources.
Quick intro: Who is Demis Hassabis?
Hassabis is the CEO of DeepMind (now part of Google) and still leads it today.
Fun fact: he is a Nobel Prize-winning AI researcher.
What does LeCun actually think?
LeCun recently said on a podcast that human thinking is "highly specialized" and that our apparent generality is limited by what we can't imagine—we only seem general because we can't see what we're missing.
In his words: "We only seem general because we can't imagine the problems we're blind to."