Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has said that OpenAI‘s ChatGPT represents a product, not actual research and development in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

According to him, OpenAI has not made any actual scientific breakthroughs and ChatGPT is ‘not particularly innovative’.

“When we’re talking about GPT-4, or whatever OpenAI puts out at the moment, we’re not talking about research and development, we’re talking about product development,” LeCun said during a live webcast on YouTube.

“OpenAI pivoted from an AI research lab that was relatively open, as the name indicates, to a for-profit company, and now a kind of contract research lab mostly for Microsoft that doesn’t reveal anything anymore about how they work, so this is product development; this is not R&D,” he emphasised.

LeCun, along with Andrew Ng, founder and CEO of the applied AI firm Landing.ai and the AI educational outfit DeepLearning.ai, argued against the six-month moratorium on AI testing that has been proposed by AI researchers and billionaires, including Elon Musk, reports ZDNet.

“I feel like, while AI today has some risk of harm, it is also creating real value, for education, for healthcare, is incredibly exciting, the value so many people are creating to help other people,” Ng said.

“As amazing as GPT-4 is today, building something even better than GPT-4 will help all of these applications to help a lot of people,” Ng added.LeCun predicted that free flow of research will produce programmes that will meet or exceed GPT-4 in capabilities.

OpenAI is facing a new complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) being asked to investigate the company and suspend its commercial deployment of large language models, including ChatGPT.

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