WHAT CAN AI REALLY DO NOW?

WITH SO MUCH HYPE CIRCULATING ABOUT HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD— BUT NOT A LOT OF CONCRETE SUCCESSES—HERE ARE SIX LESSONS YOU CAN ACTUALLY USE

- by GABRIEL SNYDER

"I’D BE HAPPY IF BY THE TIME I RETIRE, WE have [artificial intelligence] systems that are as smart as a cat,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, Turing Award winner and one of the founding fathers of deep learning, tells Newsweek as part of an ongoing series of conversations about the future of AI, “and that retirement is coming fast, by the way, so I don’t have much time.”

LeCun sees the extraordinary promise of AI on the horizon. But so far we haven't seen this degree of success. While venture capital and corporate investment pours billions of dollars into AI dream factories promising revolutionary transformations—whether it’s curing cancer or finally taming the email inbox—a stark reality persists: Most artificial intelligence initiatives collapse under their own ambitions.

The gulf between technological marvel and practical utility resembles a paradise island ringed by shipwrecks—the quest for supreme omniscience has left the tech landscape littered with sophisticated failures. In the pursuit of self-driving cars, Apple spent over $10 billion developing its autonomous car before abandoning the project entirely. GM burned close to $10 billion on its Cruise robotaxi unit before shutting it down in December 2024. Five years ago, Elon Musk said: “We're headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans and I think that time frame is less than five years from now.” But so far, we're holding our own.

Against this backdrop of inflated expectations and deflating results, a more nuanced understanding has emerged from those like LeCun, who've spent decades wrestling with the actual mechanics of intelligent systems. To cut through the industry's hype and identify what's reliable, Newsweek has gathered a remarkable constellation of experts through its AI Impact interview series.