Regardless of who is right or wrong, “Don’t fear the terminator” is a weird straw-man to raise in a discussion about AI risk. He’s setting up a weak opponent to argue against, when the AI risk community have a large repertoire of stronger cases. “Don’t fear the paper clip maximizer” would be a stronger case to put forth IMO.

In his response points 2&3 he asserts that alignment is easy; simply train the AI with laws as part of the objective function and it will never break laws. I think there has been a lot of investigation and discussion as to why this is harder than it sounds. For example LeCun is explicitly talking about current models that are statically trained to a fixed objective function, but one can easily imagine a future agentic AI (imagine “personal Siri) that will continue to grow, learn, and update in the world in response to rewards from its owner. Maybe he is right about near-term models but I’m completely unconvinced that his arguments hold generally.

Anyway, maybe the “terminator scenario” is a concern LeCun hears from uninformed reporters/lay people that he felt the need to debunk. It’s a valid point as far as it goes, but it has little to do with the actual state of the cutting edge of AI risk research.

From my reading of the full article, Bengio who was/is also well-versed in the latest deep learning research was leaning more toward the Russell argument as well.

(It links to a previous debate with Eleizer too.)