AI pioneer Yann LeCun rejects Anthropic’s 50 percent job loss prediction: 'Destructive and dangerous'

Former Meta AI Chief Scientist Yann Lecun has criticized Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for his remarks that AI will lead to reduction in 50% of all tech jobs. Lecun noted that AI lab CEOs inlcuding himself, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton (widely regarded as Godfather of AI) are not the right experts on how the technology will affect jobs and economy.

Instead, Lecun noted that the economists can be a better judge of how AI will affect the job market.

“Dario is wrong. He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market. Don't listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic. Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this”

When a user in replies pointed out that the clip of Dario was from an interview around 6 months back, Lecun responded writing, “It's still wrong, destructive, and dangerous.:”

Notably, Lecun had also recently criticized Anthropic for spreading fear about its Mythos AI model which it revealed earlier in the month but refused to release to the public due to cybersecurity risks.

Replying to a post on X, Lecun wrote, “Mythos drama = BS from self-delusion.”

In an interview last year, Amodei had called for the end of ‘sugar-coating’ by AI companies on what the technology could bring next including mass layoffs across technology, finance, law and other white-collar jobs. Amodei has warned that AI coudl wipe off nearly 50% of the entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years.

In his essay ‘The Adolescence of Technology’ written earlier this year, Amodei had warned that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”

“I suspect we’ll have powerful AI (which would be, technologically speaking, enough to do most or all jobs, not just entry level) in much less than 5 years.” he wrote

Not everyone agrees with Dario:

Anthropic's critics have warned that the company's commitment to safety may be a calculated business strategy instead. In a leaked memo OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser wrote, Anthropic's narrative is "built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI."

Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had also criticized Anthropic's policy and said last year that he "pretty much disagree[s] with almost everything" on the topic said by Dario Amodei.

“He believes that AI is so scary that only they should do it…[he believes] that AI is so expensive, nobody else should do it … And three, AI is so incredibly powerful that everyone will lose their jobs, which explains why they should be the only company building it.” he noted