The Key to Counterbalancing AI's Dangers and Preventing Monopolization by Large Corporations

Today, I want to highlight Yann LeCun, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist and VP and Chief Scientist at #Meta, who exemplifies this drive.

When I was a post-doc at NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, I had the privilege of being his office neighbor and collaborating on four research papers. The most notable was our #NeurIPS 2014 paper, co-authored with the brilliant Jonathan and Chris, SciTech Oscar winner and the best mentor ever, now cited nearly 2000 times. It marked a breakthrough in heatmap-based human pose estimation using deep learning.

A personal anecdote that stands out from our collaboration involves a challenge we faced while working on this paper. We needed non-negative outputs for a particular computation, but the commonly used ReLUs were problematic. Without hesitation, he suggested SoftPlus — a function I hadn't even heard of at the time. His intuition and depth of knowledge were not just impressive but transformative for our research.

His relentless advocacy for #opensource #AI at #Meta is a beacon in an industry where many giants, like #Google and #OpenAI, are increasingly becoming more closed. His approach not only fosters innovation but also builds a collaborative and inclusive AI community and accelerates research.

This aligns perfectly with our ethos at Fast Code AI , where we believe in the power of sharing knowledge.The advancement in creating large language models (#LLMs) for regional languages, propelled by open-source frameworks, is pivotal. It's key to integrating the next billion users from linguistically diverse regions like India into the digital world.

In an industry that evolves by the minute, leaders like him, who champion open-source, are indispensable. They pave the way towards a future where collaboration and openness in AI are norms, not exceptions.

What are your experiences with open-source AI? Let's share and grow together. Thank you for your dedication and for being an exemplary figure in the tech community, reminding us that when knowledge is shared, everyone wins!