Yann LeCun says LLMs are 'not smart' and his AMI Labs is building a more flexible AI

AI is 'not smart' so what's next in artificial intelligence?

Yann LeCun argued at VivaTech that LLMs like ChatGPT can't handle real-world complexity and aren't a path to human-level intelligence. His new venture AMI Labs, founded after leaving Meta in 2025, is building JEPA—an architecture that learns abstract representations instead of memorizing statistical patterns. The company raised over $1B in seed funding from Nvidia and Jeff Bezos' family fund. Oxford's Ingmar Posner is pursuing a similar direction with world models that reason about causality. The post does not disclose JEPA's performance benchmarks or a product timeline.

Why it matters: LeCun's first major public pitch for AMI Labs' JEPA approach since leaving Meta, with BBC giving it substantial coverage. Not scoring higher because it's still directional — no runnable model or benchmark numbers yet, far from shipping.