[reggieband]

I hate that I always end up referencing the Lex Friedman podcast but it is often relevant to discussion on HN. Recently Lex spoke with Yann LeCun and they had a brief chat about AI at Meta/Facebook [1] (where I believe Yann is currently Chief AI Scientist). He claims that AI is the core of Meta and that if you were to take ML out of Meta systems the company would literally crumble because it is completely built around AI.

My feeling is this is a PR push by Facebook. All tech companies keep touting AI, especially Google but also Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. In some sense I believe these business want to control how their own success is defined. That is, they are right now convincing everyone that tech dominance is equivalent to AI dominance which is equivalent to ML dominance. In some sense this is turning into a purity test, like "which tech company is the most AI focused". I expect this kind of PR to accelerate as each company tries to prove its AI bona-fides to the market.

1. https://youtu.be/SGzMElJ11Cc?t=6597

[acchow]

These aren't startups trying to prove "AI Purity" for more funding. These are money printers that are optimizing how to print more money. And Facebook and Google are competing against each other for online advertising dollars (yes, the pie is also growing). Their revenues are up 60% and 40% over the past 2 years, so I doubt their AI plays are just about proving some purity game.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I haven't listened to the podcast, but the way I read a statement like that is, "Our business needs to do things that aren't as simple as defining manual rules, but the economics of our business prevents us from just paying people to do those things at scale."

[mrkramer]

There is no single AI company. These are all machine learning techniques. AI is spreadsheets on steroids not real intelligence.

[throwaway423342]

As a side note:

I listened to the episode with Yann. Compared to other talks (e.g. the previous one with Brian Keating) it was a bit dull and uninteresting. The answers were not that insightful.

[jcims]

>I hate that I always end up referencing the Lex Friedman podcast but it is often relevant to discussion on HN.

I do the same thing and feel the same way, like I'm astroturfing or something. If its any consolation, I don't remember ever seeing your references and I hope you don't remember mine.

[strikelaserclaw]

I mean what else could he have said? People rarely speak the complete truth if their reputation of paycheck is on the line.