How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun - Wired | The Holy Grail of Quantum Computing Is Finally Here. Or Is It? - Wired | Scammers Are Ruining Facebook Marketplace - Wired | A Demographic Time Bomb Is About to Hit the Beef Industry

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How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun - WIRED

Do not preach doom to Yann LeCun. A pioneer of modern AI and Meta’s chief AI scientist, LeCun is one of the technology’s most vocal defenders. He scoffs at his peers’ dystopian scenarios of supercharged misinformation and even, eventually, human extinction. He’s known to fire off a vicious tweet (or whatever they’re called in the land of X) to call out the fearmongers. When his former collaborators Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio put their names at the top of a statement calling AI a “societal-scale risk,” LeCun stayed away. Instead, he signed an open letter to US president Joe Biden urging an embrace of open source AI and declaring that it “should not be under the control of a select few corporate entities.”

I sat down with LeCun in a conference room at Meta’s Midtown office in New York City this fall. We talked about open source, why he thinks AI danger is overhyped, and whether a computer could move the human heart the way a Charlie Parker sax solo can. (LeCun, who grew up just outside Paris, frequently haunts the jazz clubs of NYC.) We followed up with another conversation in December, while LeCun attended the influential annual NeurIPS conference in New Orleans—a conference where he is regarded as a god. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steven Levy: In a recent talk, you said, “Machine learning sucks.” Why would an AI pioneer like you say that?

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The Holy Grail of Quantum Computing Is Finally Here. Or Is It? - WIRED

The world’s biggest computing companies and a raft of well-funded startups all agree: The future of computing is manipulating data with quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, governments, private companies, and venture capitalists have collectively invested billions of dollars into quantum computing, which aims to solve problems using a new type of logic enabled by harnessing quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement rather than ordinary 1’s and 0’s. Yet despite some prototypes capable of elementary operations, the hardware isn’t reliable enough to be practically useful.

Researchers from Google and Colorado-based startup Quantinuum independently announced results this year that advanced a long-sought idea tipped to solve quantum hardware’s flakiness. Both teams demonstrated a mechanism needed for a component called a topological qubit, which should offer a way to hold onto and manipulate information encoded into quantum states more robustly than current hardware designs. But did the two companies actually make the long-sought component? It depends who you ask.

Physicists developed the design of the topological qubit to reduce computational errors, enabling more complex algorithms and opening the door to the technology’s projected moneymaking applications, from drug discovery to financial modeling to more efficient AI. “This could well be a transistor moment for the quantum computing industry,” said Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan in the company’s announcement. “We have used a quantum computer as the machine tool for building topological qubits.”

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Scammers Are Ruining Facebook Marketplace - WIRED

This year, I decided to get rid of my Amazon starter couch and buy a real one. So I listed the generic, velvet-green futon on Facebook Marketplace, thinking some college students or recent New York transplants would happily scoop it up at a discounted price.

Since September, I have received many inquiries about this couch—nearly all from people who are likely scammers. They respond to the listing and offer me full price in Facebook Messenger from the jump (maybe my first clue, a real Facebook Marketplace veteran knows to haggle). Then, they ask some basic questions that are already in the item’s description: “Where are you located?” “What’s the condition?” Once I’ve repeated myself and given the cross streets closest to my home, there comes another refrain: The buyer either says they must pay now, so that I would take the item off the listing, or so that their husband/brother/son/mover, you name it, can come pick up the futon later that day.

Because it seems no real person would offer to send payment over Zelle before ever seeing that the futon is real, I didn’t accept any of these offers. If I did, it’s likely these people would have sent a phishing link—either as a text to my phone number or in an email—disguised as communication from Zelle, looking to drain me of more money than the couch is worth. For now, I’m stuck with this futon, folded up in the corner of my tiny apartment. So far I’ve been unable to use Facebook Marketplace for its intended purpose: buying and selling useful things among my neighbors.

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A Demographic Time Bomb Is About to Hit the Beef Industry - WIRED

The early 1970s were the real heyday of beef in the US. It was the era of stroganoff, stews, and casseroles, steak lunches and 60-cent hamburgers. It was also the beginning of a long decline for the all-American meat. In 1975, Americans on average ate close to 90 pounds of beef each year. That has now dipped to around 57 pounds, and chicken has assumed beef’s place as the most-consumed meat in the US.

Falling appetite for beef is good news for the environment. Beef produces 10 times the greenhouse gas emissions of poultry or pig meat and between 20 and 60 times more than many plant-based forms of protein. But to really work out where beef consumption might be headed, you need to look at who exactly is really into eating cows, and that’s where things get interesting.

Earlier this year a study from Tulane University in New Orleans found that a relatively small number of Americans are responsible for the lion’s share of beef consumption—and those eaters tend to skew older and male. But the beef industry isn’t content with the narrowing demographics of its customers—it has its eyes on creating a whole new generation of beef-eating stalwarts.

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