Lex Fridman interviews Yann LeCun about Sophia the robot and whether AI needs a body. LeCun criticizes Sophia’s marketing as misleading art presented as advanced AI and calls out hype in some startups and papers. He argues embodiment is not strictly necessary but grounding is: machines need perceptual experience (vision, touch, video, or interaction in virtual/real environments) to acquire common-sense knowledge (illustrated via the Winograd schema trophy/suitcase example). LeCun also claims emotions (driven by prediction of contentment and uncertainty) are necessary components for autonomous intelligence, using the basal ganglia as an analogy for miscontentment and fear as anticipation of bad outcomes.
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Foreign. You've criticized the art project that is Sophia the robot. And what that project essentially does is uses our natural inclination to anthropomorphize things that look like human and give them more. Do you think that could be used by. By AI systems like in the movie Her? So do you think that body is needed to create a feeling of intelligence?
Well, if Sophia was just an art piece, I would have no problem with it, but it's presented as something else.
Let me add that comment real quick. If creators of Sophia could change something about their marketing or behavior in general, what would it be? What.
What's just about everything?
I mean, don't you think. Here's a tough question. Let me. So I agree with you. So Sophia is not. The general public feels that Sophia can do way more than she actually can.
That's right.
And the people who created Sophia are not honestly publicly communicating, trying to teach the public.
Right. But.
Here'S a tough question. Don't you think this the same thing is scientists in industry and research are taking advantage of the same misunderstanding in the public when they create AI companies or publish stuff.
Some companies, yes. I mean, there is no sense of. There's no desire to delude, there's no desire to. To kind of overclaim what something is done. Right. You publish a paper on AI that has this result on ImageNet, it's pretty clear. I mean, it's not even interesting anymore. But I don't think there is that. I mean, the reviewers are generally not very forgiving of unsupported claims of this type, but there are certainly quite a few startups that have had a huge amount of hype around this that I find extremely damaging. And I've been calling it out when I've seen it. So. Yeah, but to go back to your original question, the necessity of embodiment, I don't think embodiment is necessary. I think grounding is necessary. So I don't think we're going to get machines that really understand language without some level of grounding in the real world. And it's not clear to me that language is a high enough bandwidth medium to communicate how the real world works. I think for this.
Can you talk to what grounding means?
So grounding means that. So there is this classic problem of common sense reasoning, the Winograd schema. So I tell you, the trophy doesn't fit in the suitcase because it's too big, or the trophy doesn't fit in the suitcase because it's too small. And the it in the first case Refers to the trophy in the second case to the suitcase. And the reason you can figure this out is because you know what the trophy in the suitcase are. You know, one is supposed to fit in the other one and you know, the notion of size and a big object doesn't fit in a small object, and unless it's a Tardis, things like that. Right. So you have this knowledge of how the world works, of geometry and things like that. I don't believe you can learn everything about the world by just being told in language how the world works. I think you need some low level perception of the world, be it visual, touch, whatever, but some higher bandwidth perception of the world.
So by reading all the world's text, you still may not have enough information.
That's right. There's a lot of things that just will never appear in text and that you can't really infer. So I think common sense will emerge from certainly a lot of language interaction, but also with watching videos, or perhaps even interacting in virtual environments and possibly robot interacting in the real world. But I don't actually believe necessarily that this last one is absolutely necessary, but I think there's a need for some grounding.
But the final product doesn't necessarily need to be embodied. No, you're saying it just needs to have an awareness, a grounding, but it.
Needs to know how the world works, to have, you know, to not be frustrated, frustrating to talk to.
And you talked about emotions being important. That's. That's a whole nother topic.
Well, so, you know, I talked about this, the basal ganglia, ganglia as the, the thing that calculates your level of miscontentment. And then there is this other module that tries to do a prediction of whether you're going to be content or not. That's the source of some emotion. So fear, for example, is an anticipation of bad things that can happen to you. You have this inkling that there is some chance that something really bad is going to happen to you and that creates fear. When you know for sure that something bad is going to happen to you, you kind of give up. Right. It's not fear anymore, it's uncertainty that creates fear. So. So the punchline is, we're not going to have autonomous intelligence without emotions. Okay.
Whatever the heck emotions are. So you mentioned very practical things of fear, but there's a lot of other mess around it.
But there are kind of the results of, you know, drives.
Yeah, there's deeper biological stuff going on and I've talked to a few folks on this. There's fascinating stuff that ultimately connects to our. To it, to our brain.
