Meta’s AI chief says self-supervised learning can build the metaverse and maybe even human-level AI

When Yann LeCun gives talks, he’s apt to include a slide showing a famous painting of a scene from the French Revolution. Superimposed over a battle scene are these words: « THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE SUPERVISED. »

LeCun, VP and chief AI scientist of Meta (formerly Facebook), believes that the next AI revolution will come about when AI systems no longer require supervised learning. No longer will they rely on carefully labeled data sets that provide ground truth in order for them to gain an understanding of the world and perform their assigned tasks. AI systems need to be able to learn from the world with minimal help from humans, LeCun says. In an email Q&A with IEEE Spectrum, he talked about how self-supervised learning can create more robust AI systems imbued with common sense.

He’ll be exploring this theme tomorrow at a virtual Meta AI event titled Inside the Lab: Building for the Metaverse With AI. That event will feature talks by Mark Zuckerberg, a handful of Meta’s AI scientists, and a discussion between LeCun and Yoshua Bengio about the path to human-level AI.