Yann LeCun, the former Chief AI Scientist at Meta and one of the most decorated researchers in the history of the field, has fired back at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei after Amodei predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) could wipe out up to 50% of all entry-level tech, law, consulting and finance jobs within the next one to five years.LeCun, who is one of the three Godfathers of AI, responded in the most blunt way possible, leaving not much room for interpretation. He wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Dario is wrong. He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market.” LeCun also sidelined himself, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; other Godfathers of AI Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, saying that people should listen to economists.“Don’t listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic. Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this,” he said. Instead, LeCun pointed people toward a specific group of economists who have spent their careers studying exactly this question: Philippe Aghion, Erik Brynjolfsson, Daron Acemoglu, Andrew McAfee, and David Autor.
Dario Amodei on job cuts due to AI
Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic after leaving OpenAI and leads one of the most well-funded AI safety companies in the world, made the remarks in a recent television interview. Amodei painted a stark picture of where AI is headed. He argued that AI systems are already capable of tackling genuinely complex challenges. But it was his comments about the job market that grabbed the most attention. This is not the first time that he has raised job concerns. In an interview last year, Amodei warned that AI may wipe off nearly 50% of the entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years. In his essay ‘The Adolescence of Technology’, the executive warned that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”“I suspect we’ll have powerful AI (which would be, technologically speaking, enough to do most or all jobs, not just entry level) in much less than 5 years,” he wrote in the essay earlier this year.