Yann LeCun, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers, has a startling confession: “We don't have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat.”
LeCun, who spent a decade as chief AI scientist at Facebook-owner Meta before leaving in 2025, founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) in Paris with a singular mission: to build an AI that can genuinely reason about the real world. His target is the very technology that powers ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini – large language models (LLMs) that, he argues, have hit a fundamental ceiling.
“Yann LeCun says current AI systems lack physical world understanding and has raised $1bn for a new approach.”
“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,” LeCun said on the sidelines of VivaTech, France’s leading technology conference.
LLMs excel at tightly defined tasks – coding, mathematical problems, generating text – but LeCun insists that these are predictable puzzles, not genuine intelligence. “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.”
To illustrate the gap, he holds a pen upright on its tip. Even a toddler knows it will topple, but no human would try to predict the exact direction. An LLM, however, would generate a single statistical prediction – and be wrong, because it cannot reason about the physical reality.
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 the system to assess the likely outcomes of actions. The approach involves difficult mathematics to filter out useless information, LeCun says.
Investors are betting that LeCun can deliver where LLMs fall short. Earlier this year, AMI Labs announced it had raised more than $1bn (£760m) in seed funding – one of the largest such rounds in Europe. Backers include US computer chip giant Nvidia and the fund that manages the private wealth of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos.