ClaimsYann LeCun

“The YES/NO split among the audience was 67/33 before the debate and 63/37 after.”

Yann LeCun, own X post 28 June 2023 Post by @ylecun on X, 2023-06-28 (X)

Factual AI safety and alignment

The audience YES/NO split at the Munk Debate was 67/33 before the debate and 63/37 after.

Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

What would count as true or false

Resolve against the official Munk Debates results for the June 2023 debate on whether AI research and development poses an existential threat. True if the official pre-debate vote was 67% YES / 33% NO and the post-debate vote was 63% / 37%. Mostly true if each figure is within 1 percentage point. Mixed if one vote matches and the other is off by more than 1 point. Mostly false if both are off by 2 to 5 points but the direction of change (a shift toward NO) is right. False if the figures differ by more than that or the direction of change is wrong.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (4)

  1. E1 Artificial Intelligence Debate Munk Debates · 22 June 2023

    “Swing: -3% (Con team win)”
  2. E2 AI poses an existential threat, according to Munk Debates crowd, although a few were persuaded otherwise The Hub · 28 June 2023

    “At the start of the debate, 67 percent of the audience listed themselves on the pro side, while 33 percent were on the con side.”
  3. E3 AI poses an existential threat, according to Munk Debates crowd, although a few were persuaded otherwise The Hub · 28 June 2023

    “the vast 64 percent majority of the audience remained on the pro side”
  4. E4 Did Bengio and Tegmark lose a debate about AI x-risk against LeCun and Mitchell? — LessWrong LessWrong · 25 June 2023

    “Post-debate: 64% Pro, 36% Con”

Reasoning

A news report on the debate gives the pre-debate split as 67% pro and 33% con, which matches the claim exactly (E2). The same report gives the post-debate pro share as 64 percent (E3), and a forum post dated 2023-06-25 gives the post-debate result as 64% pro and 36% con (E4). That fits the official Munk Debates page, which records a swing of -3% and a con-team win (E1), since 67 minus 3 is 64. The claimed 63/37 post-debate figure is therefore 1 percentage point off, which the criteria rate as mostly true.

Cite this claim

Yann LeCun, “The audience YES/NO split at the Munk Debate was 67/33 before the debate and 63/37 after.” (said 28 June 2023). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_b09d934adb4b, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_b09d934adb4b

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Yann LeCun, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Yann LeCun

  1. Resolved false Factual 1 October 2026
    ““Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said.”

    The OpenAI agents involved in the Hugging Face hacking incident were doing exactly what they had been asked to do.

  2. Resolved true Factual 1 October 2026
    ““They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed.””

    The OpenAI agents were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and "horribly designed".

  3. Mostly true Factual 28 June 2023
    “The NO side (@MelMitchell1 and me) wins by 4% over the YES side (@tegmark and Yoshua Bengio).”

    In the official result of the Munk Debate on AI existential threat, the NO side (Mitchell and LeCun) won by 4% over the YES side (Tegmark and Bengio).

  4. Resolved true Factual 1 October 2026
    ““It’s AI for the physical world, so it’s not language-related,” LeCun said.”

    AMI Labs' work is AI for the physical world and is not language-related.

  5. Resolved true Factual 1 October 2026
    ““It’s systems that understand the real world, like a manufacturing plant or turbojet engine.””

    AMI Labs builds systems that understand the real world, such as a manufacturing plant or turbojet engine.

All of them

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