The world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems are not as smart as a rat when it comes to understanding the physical world, according to one of the field’s leading figures – a verdict that arrives alongside a warning from the Bank of England that AI poses an increased risk to the UK financial system.
Yann LeCun, who spent a decade as chief AI scientist at Facebook-owner Meta before leaving in 2025 to found Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), says current technologies such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini have fundamental limits. “They’re not a path towards human level or human-like intelligence, or even animal-like intelligence, because they cannot deal with real world data, they just are not built for that,” he told the BBC on the sidelines of VivaTech, France’s leading technology conference.
“Yann LeCun says current AI is not smart; Bank of England warns UK financial system at increased risk from AI.”
LeCun argues that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are good at coding, maths and generating text – well-defined, predictable problems – but lack genuine understanding. “They basically just accumulate knowledge... They can regurgitate something, you train them to regurgitate, but they’re not particularly smart. They don’t have an underlying understanding,” he said.
To illustrate the gap, LeCun holds a pen upright on its tip. A toddler knows it will topple, but no human would try to predict which direction it falls. An LLM, however, might attempt a single statistically plausible prediction – and be wrong, because it is not reasoning about physical reality. LeCun’s Paris-based AMI Labs is developing a new type of AI called Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), designed to create abstractions of the real world that allow it to assess the outcomes of actions. Earlier this year, the startup announced it had raised more than $1bn (£760m) in seed funding – one of the largest such rounds in Europe – with backing from US computer chip giant Nvidia and the fund that manages the private wealth of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos.
But even as LeCun pushes AI towards more flexible, real-world reasoning, the Bank of England has sounded its own alarm. The UK central bank said the UK financial system is at increased risk from artificial intelligence, though it gave no further details in its public statement.