Yann LeCun, chief artificial intelligence scientist at Meta, recently slammed OpenAI led by Sam Altman, calling it a "contract research organization" for Microsoft. In an interview with Wired magazine, Yann LeCun criticized OpenAI, pointing out that the artificial intelligence startup led by Altman has deviated from the originally set non-profit path.
OpenAI was co-founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and others, and adopts a non-profit model. But in 2019, the company established a for-profit subsidiary, and Microsoft initially invested $1 billion in the company, which has increased to $13 billion so far.
This decision was criticized by Yang Likun and Musk, who withdrew from the OpenAI board of directors in 2018.
"Right now, they are basically a contract research organization for Microsoft, although they have some independence," Likun Yang said in a recent interview.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Microsoft has gradually integrated OpenAI's technology into its services - from Windows to Office and Bing.
Yang Likun also criticized OpenAI for avoiding the open source model and choosing a closed source model instead. That's one reason why "the research community doesn't care much" about ChatGPT's creators, he said.
Yang Likun said that OpenAI is "no longer open," even adding that the company would not be the first to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). General artificial intelligence refers to intelligent agents or large language models that can perform intelligent tasks that humans can perform.
"One more thing, they believe AGI is coming and they will develop it sooner than anyone else. They won't," Yang Likun said.