EP20: Yann LeCun

YANN LECUN – WHY LLMS WILL NEVER GET US TO AGI

"The path to superintelligence - just train up the LLMs, train on more synthetic data, hire thousands of people to school your system in post-training, invent new tweaks on RL-I think is complete bullshit. It's just never going to work."



After 12 years at Meta, Turing Award winner Yann LeCun is betting his legacy on a radically different vision of AI. In this conversation, he explains why Silicon Valley's obsession with scaling language models is a dead end, why the hardest problem in AI is reaching dog-level intelligence (not human-level), and why his new company AMI is building world models that predict in abstract representation space rather than generating pixels.

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TIMESTAMPS

(00:00:14) – Intro and welcome

(00:01:12) – AMI: Why start a company now?

(00:04:46) – Will AMI do research in the open?

(00:06:44) – World models vs LLMs

(00:09:44) – History of self-supervised learning

(00:16:55) – Siamese networks and contrastive learning

(00:25:14) – JEPA and learning in representation space

(00:30:14) – Abstraction hierarchies in physics and AI

(00:34:01) – World models as abstract simulators

(00:38:14) – Object permanence and learning basic physics

(00:40:35) – Game AI: Why NetHack is still impossible

(00:44:22) – Moravec's Paradox and chess

(00:55:14) – AI safety by construction, not fine-tuning

(01:02:52) – Constrained generation techniques

(01:04:20) – Meta's reorganization and FAIR's future

(01:07:31) – SSI, Physical Intelligence, and Wayve

(01:10:14) – Silicon Valley's "LLM-pilled" monoculture

(01:15:56) – China vs US: The open source paradox

(01:18:14) – Why start a company at 65?

(01:25:14) – The AGI hype cycle has happened 6 times before

(01:33:18) – Family and personal background

(01:36:13) – Career advice: Learn things with a long shelf life

(01:40:14) – Neuroscience and machine learning connections

(01:48:17) – Continual learning: Is catastrophic forgetting solved?


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Music:

"Kid Kodi" — Blue Dot Sessions — via Free Music Archive — CC BY-NC 4.0.

"Palms Down" — Blue Dot Sessions — via Free Music Archive — CC BY-NC 4.0.

Changes: trimmed

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The Information Bottleneck is hosted by Ravid Shwartz-Ziv and Allen Roush, featuring in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers about the ideas shaping the future of machine learning.