Godfathers of AI are fighting over AI wiping away millions of jobs; Yann LeCun says don't listen to Geoffery Hinton as AI scientists are brilliant, be they are ...

Two of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence (AI) have different view when AI-led job cuts are concerned. Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun – widely known as the “Godfathers of AI” – have taken vastly different stances on how the technology will affect the global labor market.

While Hinton warns of a cycle-breaking collapse in employment, LeCun is adamant that the public ignore the AI experts and CEOs, and listen to the economists instead.

Hinton warns: ‘This time it is different’

Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google to speak more freely about AI risks, argues that the current AI revolution will not follow the patterns of the past. He said that historically, tech revolutions like the introduction of the tractor replaced physical labor but created new jobs in factories and offices.

However, Hinton believes AI is a unique threat because it can replace both physical and intellectual labor at the same time.

LeCun’s counter: ‘Don’t listen to us’

Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, has taken a blunt approach to the claims. Despite his “love” for Hinton, LeCun argued that his colleague understands very little about how technological revolutions actually affect the workforce.“I love Geoff. But he understands even less than [Anthropic CEO] Dario [Amodei] about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market,” he said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“Again, don't listen to AI scientists, as brilliant as they might be, and even less to AI CEOs, as successful as they might be, for questions of labor economics,” LeCun wrote on X. Instead, LeCun insists that people should follow the work of labor economists who have spent their careers studying these shifts, such as David Autor and Erik Brynjolfsson.Previously, LeCun blasted Amodei who predicted that AI could wipe out up to 50% of all entry-level jobs in tech, law, consulting and finance within the next one to five years.

Amodei argued that AI is not just a tool for specific tasks, but a “general labor substitute for humans”.LeCun’s response to Amodei was sharp: “Dario is wrong. He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market. Don't listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic. Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this.”