Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and Turing Award Winner Yann LeCun to Deliver Lecture in Chennai
Yann LeCun, VP and chief AI Scientist at Meta and a Turing Award laureate, will deliver a public lecture at the Subra Suresh Distinguished Lecture Series III on ‘How Could Machines Reach Human-Level Intelligence?’ The event will take place at The Music Academy, Chennai, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM on October 22, 2024. The lecture series, supported by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, honors Prof. Subra Suresh. Attendees will have the opportunity to gain insights from one of the world’s leading AI pioneers. Registration for the event is open at IIT Madras’ event page. LeCun is widely recognised for his groundbreaking work in machine learning and computer vision. He is a founding father of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have revolutionised image recognition and processing. LeCun’s research has led to significant advancements in speech recognition, natural language understanding, and robotics. In the late 1980s, LeCun proposed an architecture for neural networks that would help computers recognize images. His work at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1990s resulted in the development of a handwritten character recognition system that was widely adopted by banks for processing checks. Today, LeCun remains skeptical about LLMs achieving human-like reasoning and planning, so much so that he advised young researchers to not work on LLMs. He points out several significant limitations of LLMs, including their lack of logical understanding, absence of persistent memory, limited grasp of the physical world, inability to perform hierarchical planning, and shortcomings in reasoning However, LeCun  recently said that soon we will have technology to empower individuals with AI assistants, essentially creating a personal team of digital helpers for everyone with internet access. As he focused on predicting technological advancements and their potential as a scientist, he emphasised that we will have AI that will match or surpass human intelligence. “Access to these AI systems won’t necessarily be limited to smartphones. Future hardware will likely include devices like smart glasses that can see, hear, and remember things on your behalf. These glasses could answer your questions and provide assistance, similar to having a team of human staff available at all times,” said LeCun. He further mentioned that such systems will also enable seamless communication between people in different languages, as prototypes already exist that can translate hundreds of languages in real-time. This transformative technology is expected to emerge in a year or two. Yann LeCun has been vocal about smartphones becoming obsolete. Earlier he noted that in the next 10-15 years we won’t have smartphones, and will be using augmented reality glasses and bracelets to interact with intelligent assistants. “The last thing we might want is intelligent virtual assistants that help us in our daily lives. So today all of us here are carrying a smartphone in our pockets, 10 years from now or 15 years from now we’re not going to have smartphones anymore we’re going to have augmented reality glasses”,said LeCun.
The event will take place at The Music Academy, Chennai, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM on October 22, 2024.
Yann LeCun, VP and chief AI Scientist at Meta and a Turing Award laureate, will deliver a public lecture at the Subra Suresh Distinguished Lecture Series III on ‘How Could Machines Reach Human-Level Intelligence?’
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["AI", "machine learning", "ML", "neural network", "computer vision", "AI assistants", "virtual assistants", "image recognition", "R", "Go"]
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.