Yann LeCun holds a pen upright on its tip. Let go, he says, and even a toddler knows it will topple – but no human bothers guessing which way. Yet a chatbot like ChatGPT, built on statistical patterns, would try to predict that exact direction. And it would almost certainly be wrong, because it is not reasoning about the physical world.
“We don’t have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat,” LeCun tells me on the sidelines of VivaTech, France’s leading technology conference.
“Yann LeCun raises $1bn for AI system JEPA, arguing LLMs like ChatGPT lack real-world understanding.”
The man who spent a decade as chief AI scientist at Facebook-owner Meta left in 2025 and founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) in Paris. His mission: to move artificial intelligence beyond systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, which he says will never handle the messy realities of the real world – like getting a robot to do household chores.
“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 says.
Investors are betting he is right. 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.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are “extremely good” at coding, mathematical problems and generating text, LeCun concedes. But those are well-defined, predictable tasks. “They [LLMs] 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 says.
In the real world, every action produces a bewildering array of outcomes, requiring a more flexible type of intelligence. LeCun’s answer is a system called Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). It creates abstractions of reality – filtering out useless information through difficult maths – allowing it to assess the outcomes of actions.
The ambition is nothing less than a robot brain that, even at its most basic level, can outthink a rat. Whether JEPA can bridge that gap – and deliver a machine that truly understands the physical world – remains the question that $1bn is now chasing.