Chief scientist of major corporation can’t handle criticism of the work he hypes
I don&#x27;t know LeCun personally, but there&#x27;s a lot of backstory here that this polemical clickbait is leaving out.<p>- LeCun has a history of getting mobbed by &quot;AI ethics&quot; types on Twitter, and in the past he was very deferential to these folks, and even left Twitter for a while. I wrote about some of that here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jonstokes.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;googles-colosseum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jonstokes.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;googles-colosseum</a><p>- The MIT Tech Review, which is the author&#x27;s main source here apart from Twitter, is techlash rag, and they went through a long phase where they only published anti-AI stuff from the &quot;AI ethics&quot; people. Most of those writers I used to follow there on this topic have since moved on to other pubs, and the EIC responsible for this mess has moved on to run WIRED. But it seems they&#x27;re still publishing the same kind of stuff even with new staff and management. They have exactly one and only one editorial line on AI in general and LeCun in specific, and that is &quot;lol AI so racist and overhyped!&quot; It&#x27;s boring and predictable.<p>- LeCun has a longstanding beef with Marcus, and the two treat each other pretty poorly in public. Marcus seems to have a personal axe to grind with LeCun. Given that Marcus has been leading the mob on this, it&#x27;s not shocking that LeCun got crappy with him.<p>- Emily Bender, Grady Booch, and the other folks cited in the MIT Tech Review piece all, to a person, have exactly one line on AI, everywhere at all times and in all circumstances, and it&#x27;s the same one I mentioned above. You could code a bot with a lookup table to write their tweets about literally anything AI-related.<p>- Yeah, LeCun is a prickly nerd who gets his back up when certain people with a history of attacking him come after him yet again. He should probably should stay chill.<p>- &quot;AI so overhyped&quot; is a pose, not an argument, an investment thesis, or a career plan. But hey, you do you.<p>Anyway, I hate to be defending anything Meta-related, but this article is slanted trash, its sources haters who have only one, incredibly repetitive thing to say about AI, and the author is a hater.