“OpenAI Is Not Particularly Advanced”: Silencing Criticism Amongst the Noise of ChatGPT

Recent statements from Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, have put some much-needed silencing amongst the high praise of ChatGPT. 

An online discussion transcribed by ZDNet reveals that perhaps, after all, ChatGPT is not an unsung hero. LeCun stated “ChatGPT is not particularly innovative”, “nothing revolutionary” and is simply “nicely done”. LeCun, during the Zoom that both press and executives attended, essentially reaffirmed that ChatGPT is not really as advanced as other lab work that has been around for many years. 

What Is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT, in simple terms, is a chatbot that OpenAI launched in 2022. The software was only released 56 days ago yet it has taken the world by storm. ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, can create human-like text when prompted. 

A simple cue “write a 500-word story about penguins” is taken by the chatbot and produced in only a matter of seconds. ChatGPT is easy to use and can help create assignments, product descriptions and other tasks instantly. As a result, it has caused debate and concern among professionals such as educators, copywriters and AI scientists as to how ChatGPT will transform our everyday lives and jobs in the near future. 

LeCun Re-Orders the Narrative 

“OpenAI is not particularly an advance compared to the other labs, at all,” claimed LeCun. 

LeCun continued to criticise the chatbot and reminded people that there are other similar technologies which are just as innovative and have been in the world of Tech for many years. One argument he raised is that “self-supervised learning” had been something he has advocated for a long time, long before OpenAI launched ChatGPT. 

Furthermore, he reminded the audience that transformers were a Google invention launched in 2017. Transformers are a deep-learning model or language neural net that has become the foundation of the language GPT-3. 

So, language learning models are not revolutionary thanks to ChatGPT. Or, as LeCun said, “there’s a whole history of this… this did not come out of a vacuum”. 

He then proceeded to tell his listeners that Meta is not only going to create a “text generation” but also “creation aids”, such as AI art – which, is a future debate itself. Evidently, LeCun’s claims reaffirm amongst the excitement of ChatGPT that it is not anything new. But, how will ChatGPT affect different industries and businesses in future? Time will only tell.