He's Been Right About Al for 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyon

Hes Been Right About Al for 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyone Is Wrong.

As a graduate student in the 1980s, Yann LeCun had trouble finding an adviser for his Ph.D. thesis on machine learningbecause no one else was studying the topic, he recalled later.

More recently, hes become the odd man out at Meta . Despite worldwide renown as one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, he has been increasingly sidelined as the companys approach diverged from his views on the technologys future. On Tuesday, news broke that he may soon be leaving Meta to pursue a startup focused on so-called world models, technology that LeCun thinks is more likely to advance the state of AI than Metas current language models.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been pouring countless billions into the pursuit of what he calls superintelligence, hiring an army of top researchers tasked with developing its large language model, Llama, into something that can outperform ChatGPT and Googles Gemini.

LeCun, by his choice, has taken a different direction. He has been telling anyone who asks that he thinks large language models, or LLMs, are a dead end in the pursuit of computers that can truly outthink humans. Hes fond of comparing the current state-of-the-art models to the mind of a catand he believes the cat to be smarter. Several years ago, he stepped back from managing his AI division at Meta, called FAIR, in favor of a role as an individual contributor doing long-term research.

Ive been not making friends in various corners of Silicon Valley, including at Meta, saying that within three to five years, this [world models, not LLMs] will be the dominant model for AI architectures, and nobody in their right mind would use LLMs of the type that we have today, the 65-year-old said last month at a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

LeCun has been talking to associates about creating a startup focused on world models, recruiting colleagues and speaking to investors, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. A world model learns about the world around it by taking in visual information, much like a baby animal or young child does, versus LLMs, which are predictive models based on vast databases of

text.

LeCun didnt respond to requests for comment, and Meta declined to comment.

Early innovations

LeCun was born in Paris, raised in the citys suburbs and attended whats now known as the Sorbonne University in France in the 1980s. While

getting his Ph.D., he married his wife, Isabelle,

and they had the first of their three sons. A woodwind musician, he played with an ensemble that sometimes supported a Renaissance dance troupe.

Always ahead of the curve, LeCun studied machine learning before it was en vogue. He worked in Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hintons Al lab in Toronto before Hinton became an AI legend, and spent much of his early professional career in New Jersey at Bell Labs, the institute famous for the sheer number of inventions that came out of it.

The thing that excites me the most is working with people who are smarter than me, because it amplifies your own abilities, LeCun told Wired magazine in 2023.

At Bell, LeCun helped develop handwriting-recognition technology that became widely used by banks to read checks automatically. He also worked on a project to digitize and distribute paper documents over the internet.

LeCun, whos said hes always been interested in physics, mostly worked with physicists at Bell and read a number of physics textbooks.

Ilearned a lot by reading things that are not apparently connected with AI or computer science (my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, and my formal CS training is pretty small), he said during a Reddit ask-me-anything session 12 years ago.

In 2003, LeCun started teaching computer science at New York University, and later he became the founding director of NYUs Center for Data Science. When hes in New York, he has been known to frequent the citys jazz clubs.

In 2013, Zuckerberg personally recruited him to head up a new AI division at what was then called Facebook. LeCun oversaw the lab for four years, stepping down in 2018 to become an individual contributor and Facebooks chief AI scientist.

He won the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, the highest prize in computer science, along with Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The award honored their foundational work on neural networks, multilayered systems that underlie many powerful AI systems, from OpenAIs chatbots to self-driving cars.

Since then, LeCun, who speaks with a light French accent and is known for wearing black Ray-Ban glasses and collared shirts, has largely become a figurehead for the company. He wasnt part of the team that helped create Metas first open-source large language model, called Llama, and he hasnt been involved in the day-to-day operations of their development since.

LeCun works on his own projects and travels to conferences, talking about Metas AI glasses and his own views on the path to AI advancement, among other things, people who have worked with him said.

Lon Bottou, a longtime friend of LeCuns, previously told The Wall Street Journal that hes

stubborn in a good way, meaning he is willing to listen to others views, but has strong convictions of his own.

He also holds strong opinions on a variety of other topics. I am everything the religious right despises, he wrote on his website: a scientist, an atheist, a leftist (by American standards at least), a university professor, and a Frenchman.

Breaking away

Most of his recent takes have been knocks on the LLMs at the center of Zuckerbergs ambitions-

and also of nearly every other major tech companys.

We are not going to get to human-level Al just by scaling LLMs, he said on Alex Kantrowitzs Big Technology podcast this spring. Theres no way, absolutely no way, and whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues, its not going to happen within the next two years.

Theres absolutely no way in hell to-pardon my French.

This summer, as part of a major restructuring,Zuckerberg named 28-year-old Alexandr Wang as Metas new chief AI officer-LeCuns new boss-and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao as Metas new chief scientist.

Employees inside Metas thousand-person-plus

AI division started asking each other: Whats going to happen to Yann LeCun?

Some viewed the announcements as LeCun being cast aside after not getting onboard with Zuckerbergs AI vision.

There is no change in Yanns role. He will continue to be Chief Scientist for FAIR! the CEO posted on his social media app, Threads, in July, referrino to the Al division that he hired LeCun to

lead over a decade ago. FAIR is shorthand for the Fundamental AI Research group.

Im looking forward to working with Shengjia, LeCun replied in a comment.

In recent months though, LeCuns once burgeoning AI division has faced job cuts and fewer resources, and has become less prestigious internally, according to current and former employees.

For a long time, the division, helmed by LeCun, was seen as a place to discuss lofty ideas about the future of artificial intelligence, conduct experiments that may or may not pan out, and not give too much thought to how their research breakthroughs might be turned into actual products someday.

Now, Metas new AI research organization, full of fresh hires making millions of dollars, is being led by Wang, who is pushing the teams to make rapid breakthroughs and quickly turn those advancements into products.

LeCun, meanwhile, has been tromping through Asia and Europe and speaking at conferences. In one such talk earlier this year, he doled out advice to aspiring researchers: If you are a Ph.D. student in AI, you should absolutely not work on LLMs.