Meta’s former chief AI scientist, Yann Lecun has a message for everyone in the technology industry: The AI buzzword almost every company believes in– Large Language Model or LLM — is a dead-end. In an interview to Financial Times, Lecun said, “LLMs are useful but fundamentally limited and constrained by language.
To achieve human-level intelligence, you have to understand how our physical world works too.” He added that “LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence.”This is not the first time that LeCun has spoken against LLMs. The man also known as Godfather of AI has been quite vocal about his disdain for large language models (LLMs) and their potential to reach superhuman intelligence. LeCun’s solution for achieving superhuman intelligence relies on an architecture called V-JEPA, a so-called world model.
“World models aim to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data, rather than just language. They are also able to plan, reason and have persistent memory. He calls this kind of intelligence Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI,” he said.Though LeCunn did not clearly say why he left Meta. He did say that staying became politically difficult.
Meta’s ex-employee said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes his world model research, “but the crowd who were hired for the company’s new superintelligence push are “completely LLM-pilled”.Here LeCunn meant the team that joined Meta from ScaleAI. In June 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. The new AI superintelligence project is led by execs including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang. Earlier in June, the company said it would hire Wang, now Meta’s chief AI officer, and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into Scale AI.
Under the restructuring announced by Zuckerberg, LeCun was made to report to Alex Wang. This clearly alienated LeCun. “I’m sure there’s a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence,” he says. “But I’m not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. My integrity as a scientist cannot allow me to do this.”