Meta's chief scientist: NVIDIA is supplying weapons for the on-going AI war

Meta's chief scientist has had some interesting words to say about the AI industry, the quantum computing business, and even a few potshots at the AI GPU champion: NVIDIA.

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During Meta's recent 10-year anniversary of its Fundamental AI Research team, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, talked about NVIDIA and AI, where he said: "I know Jensen. There is an AI war, and he's supplying the weapons. [If] you think AGI is in, the more GPUs you have to buy".

LeCun continued, talking about AI and how we're seeing the industry progress through using LLMs (Large Language Models) and that AI learning from only text data is simply not the "optimal" way. What is being done now isn't enough to create human-like AI systems... which is the goal of the likes of AI giants like OpenAI, in search of AGIs (artificial general intelligence).

He continued: "Text is a very poor source of information. Train a system on the equivalent of 20,000 years of reading material, and they still don't understand that if A is the same as B, then B is the same as A. There's a lot of really basic things about the world that they just don't get through this kind of training".

• Read more: NVIDIA warned: redesign a GPU for AI for China, US government will stop them the next day

CNBC asked if the technology industry will need more hardware providers as the insatiable need for AI hardware by companies like Meta continues. LeCun added: "It doesn't require it, but it would be nice" but quickly reiterated that GPU technology is still the gold standard when it comes to AI.

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LeCun said that the computer chips of the future might not be called GPUs... adding: "What you're going to see hopefully emerging are new chips that are not graphical processing units, they are just neural, deep learning accelerators".

LeCun was also skeptical of quantum computing, with companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others having pumped billions of dollars into it. Many researchers outside of Meta think that quantum computing machines could super-speed advancements in industries like the drug industry, science, climate, and more... but LeCun doesn't believe in this.

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He added: "The number of problems you can solve with quantum computing, you can solve way more efficiently with classical computers. Quantum computing is a fascinating scientific topic, but it's less clear about the"practical relevance and the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful".

Meta senior fellow and former tech chief Mike Schroepfer concurred, adding that he looks at quantum technology every few years and thinks that there "may come at some point, but it's got such a long time horizon that it's irrelevant to what we're doing. The reason we started an AI lab a decade ago was that it was very obvious that this technology is going to be commercializable within the next years' time frame".