Once you’re more senior, then it’s a different thing. Frankly, it’s only in the last 10 years that I’ve been straddling the fence in a situation where I’m pretty senior and can choose what I want to work on. At FAIR, we don’t take part-time researchers who are also faculty if they’re not tenured. Even the tenured, we tend only to take people who are quite senior, well established, and sometimes only for a short time, for a few years or something like that. It’s not for everyone. It depends on which way you want to have an impact and whether you like working with students. In industry, you tend to be more hands-on, whereas in a university, you work through students generally. There are pluses and minuses. You are one of the well-known scientists in our community who does not shy away from talking to younger and less experienced people on social media, in articles, and at venues like ICCV and MICCAI. Do you also learn from these exchanges? The main reason for doing it is to inspire young people to work on interesting things. I’ve been here at ICCV for about an hour and a half, and about 100 people came to take selfies with me. I don’t turn them down because they’re so enthusiastic. I don’t want to disappoint them. I think we should encourage enthusiasm for science and technology from young people. I find that adorable. I want to encourage it. I want to inspire people to work on technology that will improve the human condition and make progress in knowledge. That’s my goal. It’s very indirect. Sometimes, those people get inspired. Sometimes, that puts them on a good trajectory. That’s why I don’t shyaway. There are a lot of exchanges about the potential benefits and risks of AI, for example. The discussions I’ve had on social media about this have allowed me to think about things I didn’t think of spontaneously and answer questions I didn’t know people were asking themselves. It makes my argument better to have these discussions on social media and have them in public as well. I’ve held public debates about the risks of AI with various people, including Yoshua Bengio and people like that. I think it’s useful. Those are the discussions we need to have between well-meaning, serious people. The problem with social media is that there’s a lot of noise and people who don’t know anything. I don’t think we should blame people for not knowing; I think we should blame people for being dishonest, not for not knowing things. I’ma professor. My job is to educate people. I’m not going to blame them for not knowing something! You started in a place where you 5 DAILY Monday Yann LeCun MICCAI
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