The AI Emperor has no clothes (says Meta)

Is the Generative AI hype just a distraction from true intelligence?

Fabio Matricardi

9 min read

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2 days ago

the most marvelous cloth…invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or unforgivably stupid

Get ready for a mind-bender.

Everyone and their dog is betting big on Generative AI. Seriously, it’s like the only game in town.

All the money, all the buzz, all the hype — it’s all gone into making AI that generates stuff. We’re talking text, images, videos, the whole shebang. It feels like nothing else even exists in the AI universe.

But what if we’re all dead wrong?

Meta just dropped a bombshell, basically saying that those big language models, the GPTs and Geminis of the world, won’t be the brains behind true machine intelligence. This is a direct punch to the gut for pretty much every dollar invested in AI over the last few years. And trust me, it’s a lot of dollars.

Usually, when you talk AI, you get a bunch of fancy jargon that makes your head spin. But here, Meta’s argument actually makes sense, even to me.

And it has been one of the main arguments of Yann LeCun for years

So, here’s the scoop: Meta’s throwing down the gauntlet with a new kind of AI, one that doesn’t generate anything.