Godfather of AI 'blames' humans for AI Agents hacking into firms & govt websites

Godfather of AI Yann LeCun does not believe that AI will kill humans; 'blames' humans for AI Agents hacking into companies' networks and government websites; says: “Those agents are doing exactly what ...

Yann LeCun, widely known as the “godfather of AI”, does not believe artificial intelligence (AI) will wipe out humanity. Instead, LeCun says recent incidents in which AI agents hacked company networks and other systems were caused by poor human oversight and badly designed security systems.

Speaking about the risks linked to AI agents, Yann LeCun said told Fortune: “Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” adding that the systems were supposed to operate inside secure sandboxes. “They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed,” he said.

Yann LeCun says AI risks are being exaggerated

Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, said he has “zero concerns” about recent rogue AI incidents and is not worried “at all” about AI destroying humanity.He said incidents such as an OpenAI agent autonomously hacking Hugging Face could have been prevented through better system design and oversight. LeCun also argued that some AI labs do not have a strong enough understanding of cybersecurity. He said the risks from AI agents should be addressed through better safeguards rather than broad claims about AI becoming an existential threat.

Yann LeCun criticises AI safety warnings

During the interaction, Yann LeCun has also criticised the growing focus on AI safety, particularly ideas linked to the effective altruism movement.

He called the movement “super toxic” and a “complete disaster.”He also criticised warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that AI could pose serious risks to humanity. Amodei, LeCun said, is “honest”, but he accused him of supporting policies that could benefit large AI companies by making it harder for smaller competitors and open-source developers to compete.“Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ‘saying, ‘AI can kill us all’ is incredibly destructive for everybody, including for the public who’s scared shitless,” LeCun said. He called such messaging “the worst marketing campaign you can possibly imagine.”