Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is a Turing Award-winning AI researcher best known as a founding figure in deep learning and a long-time critic of the large language model paradigm. He spent 12 years as Meta's chief AI scientist before leaving at the end of 2025 to found AMI Labs, which raised over $1 billion to pursue world models—AI systems that build internal simulations of physical reality rather than predicting text tokens . His alternative architectural vision centers on JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), which compresses and predicts at the level of high-level representations in latent space rather than raw pixels or words . This stance has put him at odds with the "next token prediction produces intelligence" camp; as 5Y Capital noted in 2023, LeCun stands among the most prominent skeptics who deny that LLMs trained this way can achieve genuine intelligence . His intellectual lineage runs through a generation of researchers—one of his doctoral students at NYU, Zhaojunbo, later joined Tigerobo Technology in 2019 as its head of algorithms and frontier research .