Is Big Tech betting wrong? Meta's AI pioneer says LLM boom is a dead end

Meta's AI veteran Yann LeCun says tech giants are pouring billions into LLMs but warns they won't lead to human-level intelligence

The world’s biggest technology companies are investing enormous sums into artificial intelligence, especially into "large language models" (LLMs), the systems behind ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.

 

But one of the field’s most influential voices believes this approach is flawed. Yann LeCun, who until recently led Meta’s AI efforts, publicly questioned the global rush toward LLMs during an event in Brooklyn on Sunday evening. "LLMs are great, they're useful, we should invest in them — a lot of people are going to use them," he said as quoted by Business Insider. "They are not a path to human-level intelligence. They're just not."

 

LeCun argued that the industry’s obsession with these systems is crowding out other promising directions. "Right now, they are sucking the air out of the room anywhere they go, and so there's basically no resources [left] for anything else. And so for the next revolution, we need to take a step back and figure out what's missing from the current approaches."   

 

A long-standing critic of LLM-centric AI

 

LeCun’s critique is not new. For years, he has said that true breakthroughs will not come from models trained mainly on internet text. Instead, he believes the future lies in "world models", AI systems built on visual understanding and real-world interactions.

 

LeCun’s future at Meta has been debated for months, especially since last spring, when the company began pouring billions into hiring top LLM researchers. That shift signalled a clear move away from his preferred strategy, the news report said.

 

Reports last week suggested that LeCun may soon leave to launch his own AI startup. He did not address those reports directly on Sunday at Pioneer Works, a cultural and tech venue filled with both nostalgic Gen Xers and TikTok-era Gen Z attendees.

 

LeCun’s remarks also reflect a larger truth: what seems certain in technology today can quickly be overturned tomorrow. He was once one of the field’s most respected voices, the reason Zuckerberg hired him in 2013. But the momentum in AI has shifted dramatically toward LLMs, especially after the launch of ChatGPT. That success triggered an enormous global race to build bigger models, infrastructure and research teams, Business Insider reported.