Yann LeCun
Executive Chairman, AMI Labs. On 5 shows, 8 appearances, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
scientistacademicexecutivefounderengineer@ylecun ↗LinkedIn ↗yann.lecun.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
He received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award alongside Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton for pioneering breakthroughs in deep learning and convolutional neural networks. He served as the founding director of FAIR and Meta's Chief AI Scientist before launching AMI Labs.
5shows
8appearances
170statements
28resolved
17supported
2contradicted
61%fully supported
209said about them ↓ Everything Yann LeCun said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
LeCun: Scaling up LLMs will not produce human-level AI
“We are not going to get to human level AI by just scaling up LLMs. This is just not going to happen.”
Large language models are not the path to human-level intelligence
“LLMs are not the path to human level intelligence. LLMs work for discrete worlds. They don't work for continuous, high dimensional worlds, which is the case for video. And this is why LLMs do not understand the physical world and cannot be used in their curren…”
Expert: Superintelligence does not imply a desire to dominate humans
“There is this idea, somehow, the desire to, and the ability to dominate, is linked with intelligence. A statement that a lot of people are making, including Jeff Hinton recently, That somehow, as soon as a machine becomes intelligent, it becomes uncontrollable…”
LeCun: AI hard takeoff fears are false; no real-world exponential lasts
“So this is predicated on an assumption that is just false, which is the existence of a hard takeoff. Right? So the fact that the minute you turn on a super intelligent AI system is going to take over the world. And it's going to escape your control and it's go…”
LeCun: OpenAI's technology is well-engineered but not scientifically innovative
“Their technology is not particularly innovative from the scientific point of view. It's very well engineered. So they put together, you know, large scale scaled up system with trained with very well curated data. I mean, they know what they're doing. But in te…”
LeCun: Human-level AI will not happen within two years
“Whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues it's not going to happen within the next two years. There's absolutely no way in hell to, you know, pardon my French.”
LeCun: Human-level AI will not be achieved using autoregressive LLMs
“Well, so first of all, there is no question that eventually AI systems will understand the world in similar ways that, that humans do perhaps better ways but there will not be autoregressive large language models as a type that we're now talking about.”
LeCun: Autoregressive LLMs will be obsolete within a few years
“So my prediction is that within a few years, nobody in their right mind would use auto-reversive LLMs. They'll go away in favor of something more sophisticated and controllable. They can plan its answer as opposed to just produce one word after the other react…”
LeCun disagrees with Geoffrey Hinton on AI-driven human extinction risk
“So I understand why, why he might have wanted to leave, but I don't agree with him at all with the whole sort of, you know, probability of human extinction or whatever.”
LeCun: AI cannot reach human-level intelligence without world models and planning
“And so until we build systems that have some internal model of the world, it allows them to kind of simulate the world if you want, some way of generating actions on the world to use tools like a calculator or something of that, or interrogating a database or …”
LeCun: Inventing new things requires skills language models cannot achieve
“Inventing new things, you know, requires a type of skill and abilities that you're not gonna get from NLMs.”
LeCun: Open-source AI researchers will progress faster than closed competitors
“The people who share their research are going to move faster than the ones that don't.”
LeCun: Large language models are incapable of inventing new things
“We also know that they can hallucinate facts that aren't true but they're really, in their purest form, they are incapable of inventing new things.”
LeCun: Breakthrough scientific AI will not be an LLM
“No, not, not in the current form. I mean, and whatever form of AI would be able to do that will not be LLMs. They might use LLMs as one component.”
LeCun: Chain-of-thought prompting does not produce genuine reasoning in LLMs
“One simple way of
getting NNMs to kind of appear to reason is chain of thought, right?
So you basically tell them to generate more tokens than they really need to in the hope that in the process of generating those tokens, they're going to devote more computa…”
LeCun: Nobody knows how to build agentic systems beyond regurgitating plans
“Everybody's talking about agentic systems. Nobody has any idea how to build them other than basically regurgitating plans that have, the system has already been trained on.”
LeCun: Scaling up LLMs will not produce human-level AI
“We are not going to get to human level AI by just scaling up LLMs. This is just not going to happen.”
LeCun: Digital superintelligence will not happen within two years
“Whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues it's not going to happen within the next two years. There's absolutely no way in hell to, you know, pardon my French. The, you know, the idea that we're going to have, you know, a country of gen…”
LeCun: AI cannot reach human-level intelligence by training on text alone
“And it tells you clearly that we're not going to get to human level AI by just training on text. It's just not a rich enough source of information.”
LeCun: Pixel-level video generation will not solve AI world understanding
“Is the right way to approach this problem to train better and better video generation systems? And my answer to this is absolutely no. The problem of understanding the world does not go through the solution to the, to generating video at the pixel level.”
LeCun: Open source AI innovates faster than proprietary models can match
“Open source progress is faster and you know, a lot more innovation can take place in the open source world, which the proprietary world may have a hard time catching up with.”
LLMs primarily perform data retrieval and possess very little actual reasoning
“If it's text, they will regurgitate solutions to puzzles. They will, you know, give you answers to questions you may have. It's mostly retrieval. There's a very tiny bit of reasoning, but really not much and that's an important limitation.”
The smartest LLMs are not as smart as a house cat
“The smartest LLMs are not as smart as your house cat. And it's really true.”
OpenAI o1's search-based reasoning approach is highly inefficient
“So you may have heard of O-one from OpenAI, and there is kind of similar work at Meta and other places where this sort of very basic forms of reasoning that consists in having an LLM produce lots of different sequences of words, and then having a way of search…”
The other half of the tape: Yann LeCun's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 201 times in 80 episodes across the shows. 8 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Kantrowitz 69Harry Stebbings 41M.G. Siegler 8Nikhil Kamath 7Steeve Morin 6Rory O'Driscoll 6Matt Turck 6Jerome Pesenti 5
Statements about Yann LeCun, by other people (8)
AI Existential Risk Warnings Are Driven by Publicity Seekers
“I fully agree with Jan and not just because he was my boss at Meta, but I think if you really understand how machine learning works and you're not looking for free publicity, I don't see why you would say something like that, that, that getting more intelligen…”
Levie: Altman's 2028 superintelligence timeline is totally reasonable
“I think that, that there's kind of, that seems to be totally reasonable based on the trajectory that we're on. And I would bet that, that Sam has an even a far higher bar for what his definition of, you know, intellectual or whatever the term was, then even I …”
O'Driscoll: Yann LeCun's $3B Non-LLM Venture Is A Scary, High-Risk Bet
“Now, Juan Lacoon raising, you know, money at three billion. And that's an example of I personally look at that and say, wow, that's a scary bet, because, you know, in somewhere between 2017 and 2022, we unlocked, collectively, the industry unlocked LLMs, and w…”
Aravind Srinivas: Ilya Sutskever Truly Made Neural Networks Work Through Scale
“And I would say the forefathers like Lacan or Hinton, Benjia, they did a lot of work to establish the foundations, but one guy single-handedly, you know, with, of course, with a group of amazing engineers who worked with him, truly made it work. I'd say it's I…”
Lebrun: Open-source foundational AI models will win over closed models
“Open, obviously. You know, LLM are AI in general is an infrastructure in the future, and like every infrastructure, I'm just paraphrasing Jan, but is, is open. Open wins always with infrastructure. And so obviously I think the financial, the foundational model…”
Bordes: 2016 image recognition AI uses Yann LeCun's 1993 neural architecture
“This is exactly the same architecture of what's being used right now.”
Kantrowitz: Yann LeCun left Meta to launch a Meta-funded AI startup
“Jan LeCun has left. Inevitable. I'm not going to even take too much credit because the most likely thing ever, most likely prediction I've ever made yet. He's gonna start his own startup. Looks like Facebook is gonna fund it. So in part.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Big Technology 97
20VC 60
the MAD Podcast 30
WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 11
All-In 3
2026 51 mentions in 19 episodes 3 per episode
- AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Conscious, Superintelligence is Coming, And We Should Be Worried
- Groq’s $20BN NVIDIA Deal | Why Sam Altman Doesn’t Care About Dilution & Invisible Unemployment 2026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Elon Musk vs Sam Altman | The Implosion of Thinking Machines | Can VC Survive Public Pricing? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Claude Code Head Boris Cherny: Insane Growth, Tokenmaxxing, AI Agents' Next Frontier
- Voice AI’s Big Moment: Top Researcher on Why Everything Is Changing (Neil Zeghidour, Gradium AI)
- More OpenAI C-Suite Drama, Is Siri Seriously Broken?, Meta’s Elusive Next Hit
- Demis Hassabis: Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution & Where Are The Bottlenecks in AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- AI's Research Frontier: Memory, World Models, & Planning — With Joelle Pineau
- 11 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 73 mentions in 30 episodes 2 per episode
- Nikhil Kamath ft. Perplexity CEO, Aravind Srinivas | WTF Online Ep 1. · Nikhil Kamath
- NVIDIA VP Rev Lebaredian Talks Plan To Build AI That Understands The Real World
- Steeve Morin: Why Google Will Win the AI Arms Race & OpenAI Will Not | E1262 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tim Cook’s Final Year?, Big Tech Horse Race, Anthropic’s Profitability Push
- OpenAI’s Risky Browser Bet, Amazon’s Mass Automation Plan, Clippy’s Back
- Gruber Slams Apple's Siri Failure, Tech Stocks In Freefall, Vibecoding & OpenAI's Agents
- Google Pushes OpenAI, Bezos Returns, AI’s No. 1 Hit
- Sora 2 & AI’s Slop Era, Death Of The Creator Economy?, Apple’s SmartGlasses Roadmap
- 22 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 26 mentions in 10 episodes 3 per episode
- Why Meta Wants To Build Artificial General Intelligence — With Joelle Pineau, VP of Meta AI Research
- Aidan Gomez: What No One Understands About Foundation Models | E1191 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mike Schroepfer: Former Meta CTO on "Why The Best Leaders are Like Music Conductors" | E1158 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's Co-Founder on AI Agents, General Intelligence, and Sentience — With Jack Clark
- Arvind Narayanan: AI Scaling Myths, The Core Bottlenecks in AI Today & The Future of Models | E1195 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Is Generative AI Plateauing?, Booming Bluesky, Apple’s Smart Glasses Play
- Superintelligence, Bubbles And Big Bets: AI Investing in 2024 | Matt Turck & Aman Kabeer, FirstMark
- Meta's Chief Technology Officer On Its Augmented Reality Dreams — With Andrew Bosworth
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 33 mentions in 13 episodes 3 per episode
- Alex Lebrun: Why the EU's AI Regulation is a Disaster; How Zuck Prepares for Meetings | E1027 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Douwe Kiela: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size; Why Open Source Isn't Going to Win | E1032 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Matthieu Rouif: The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC’s Most Capital Efficient Company? | E1074 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Google's DeepMind Wants To Make Human-Level Artificial Intelligence, Says Its Chief Business Officer
- Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cris Valenzuela: AI Creators vs Hollywood Writers; How We Grew Runway into a $1.5B Company | E1054 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
2020 5 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 3 mentions in 1 episode
2015 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Yann's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Executive Chairman, AMI Labs | 4 | 83 | 60% 6/10 | full record on Big Technology → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Executive Chairman, AMI Labs | 1 +2 | 40 | 50% 5/10 | full record on 20VC → |
| WTFLEDGER | Executive Chairman, AMI Labs | 1 | 30 | 100% 3/3 | full record on WTF is with Nikhil Kamath → |
| MADLEDGER | Executive Chairman, AMI Labs | 1 | 17 | 60% 3/5 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Executive Chairman, AMI Labs | 1 | 0 | — | full record on All-In → |