Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

The AI expert at Meta has some harsh criticism of ChatGPT

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, is not impressed by ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence technology that is making headlines daily.

This might seem like an unexpected response, but Meta has its own AI program, and it has been making strong progress as well. For example, Meta’s translation AI can handle 200 languages, including some that are spoken but have no written form.

Image with languages displaying in front of a man on his laptop for Meta's 200 languages within a single AI model video.
Meta

LeCun recently spoke during an online discussion series hosted by the Collective[i] Forecast, where he took the opportunity to share his opinion that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “is not particularly innovative.” ZDNet’s report said LeCun went on to clarify that work on Large Language Models (LLM) began decades ago and ChatGPT was very well engineered, but largely based upon established techniques.

Lecun pointed out in a recent, colorfully worded tweet that LLMs don’t admit to a lack of knowledge, instead hallucinating details that are unknown. In an earlier tweet, Lecun agreed with a New York Times article that said Meta and Google were reluctant to release their competing solutions due to the likelihood of misinformation and toxic content.

LLMs are still making sh*t up.
That's fine if you use them as writing assistants.
Not good as question answerers, search engines, etc.
RLHF merely mitigates the most frequent mistakes without actually fixing the problem. https://t.co/XnDxF8Q9Zr

— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) January 22, 2023

It’s a fair point since Meta is a social media giant that is under government and media scrutiny, with past accusations of spreading misinformation. Given that it’s relatively easy to convince most LLMs to bypass its safety protocols and social filters, releasing Meta’s LLMs too soon could be disastrous for the company.

Meanwhile, Microsoft extended its partnership with OpenAI, which it has been a major investor in since 2019. Microsoft is planning to make use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Codex AI technology to enhance its products, spending billions on the project. OpenAI exclusively makes use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing network.

While OpenAI didn’t invent LLMs or many of the AI technologies that are used by ChatGPT, it certainly seems innovative to make this game-changing service available in such an unrestricted way long before Meta and Google were even considering it.

Meta makes use of AI for advanced research and within its social media networks to detect misinformation, and Google has been building AI into Android and Google search for many years. Neither company has opened up the capabilities of their AI systems to the general public with the unrestricted access that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E allow, and that makes all of the difference to the public.

Given ChatGPT’s generally positive public perception, that might change in the near future, as both Meta and Google have suggested more AI capabilities are coming soon.

Editors' Recommendations

Alan Truly
Alan is a Computing Writer living in Nova Scotia, Canada. A tech-enthusiast since his youth, Alan stays current on what is…
Why Llama 3 is changing everything in the world of AI
Meta AI on mobile and desktop web interface.

In the world of AI, you've no doubt heard about what OpenAI and Google have been up to. And now, Meta's Llama LLM (large language model) is becoming an increasingly important player in the game, especially with its open-source nature. Meta recently made a big splash with the launch of its Llama 3 AI model, and it's shaken up the field dramatically.

The reasons why are multiple and varied. It's free to use, it has a wide user base, and yes, it's open source, to name but a few. Here's why Llama 3 is taking the AI industry by storm and may shape its future for some time to come.
Llama 3 is really good
We can debate until the cows come home about how useful AIs like ChatGPT and Llama 3 are in the real world -- they're not bad at teaching you board game rules -- but the few benchmarks we have for how capable these AI are give Llama 3 a distinct advantage.

Read more
The best ChatGPT plug-ins you can use
OpenAI's website open on a MacBook, showing ChatGPT plugins.

ChatGPT is an amazing tool, and when they were introduced, plug-ins made it even better. But as of March 2024, they're no longer available as part of ChatGPT, having since been replaced by Custom GPTs, which you can make yourself. Or you can use one of the many amazing options from other developers, AI fans, and prompt engineers.

Interested in learning about how to make the best custom GPT for you? We have a guide for that. If you're more interested in the best custom GPTs available now, we have a guide for that too.

Read more
Apple finally has a way to defeat ChatGPT
A MacBook and iPhone in shadow on a surface.

OpenAI needs to watch out because Apple may finally be jumping on the AI bandwagon, and the news doesn't bode well for ChatGPT. Apple is reportedly working on a large language model (LLM) referred to as ReALM, which stands for Reference Resolution As Language Modeling. Made to give Siri a boost and help it understand context, the model comes in four variants, and Apple claims that even its smallest model performs on a similar level to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

This tantalizing bit of information comes from an Apple research paper, first shared by Windows Central, and it appears to be an early peek into what Apple has been cooking for a while now. ReALM is Apple's own LLM that was reportedly made to enhance Siri's capabilities; these improvements include a greater ability to understand context in a conversation.

Read more