Yann LeCun is not a natural contrarian, but he is playing one right now. The man often called a godfather of AI built the convolutional neural network in the late 1980s. That design still powers phone cameras, medical scans, and driver-assistance systems.
He then spent 12 years as Meta’s chief AI scientist. In November, he told Mark Zuckerberg he was leaving. To build his alternative, he raised a reported $1bn seed round.
On stage at RAISE Summit in Paris, a day after his birthday, LeCun told Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie why. His new firm, AMI, is not chasing bigger chatbots. It is building “world models,” a different kind of AI meant to understand the physical world the way a child or an animal does.
Why LLMs hit a wall
LeCun’s core claim is blunt. Large language models are useful, but they will not get us to real intelligence. They handle sequences of symbols well. They pass exams, write emails, and summarise text. They do not understand the physical world.
