The UK financial system is at increased risk from artificial intelligence, the Bank of England has said, as one of the world’s leading AI researchers warned that current systems are not smart enough to handle real-world problems.
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) in Paris, argues that large language models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini will never lead to human-level or even animal-like intelligence.
“Bank of England warns AI threatens financial stability as Yann LeCun says current systems are not smart”
“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.
AMI Labs is developing a new type of artificial intelligence not based on the technology behind ChatGPT. The company raised more than $1bn (£760m) in seed funding earlier this year, one of the largest such rounds in Europe, with investors including US computer chip giant Nvidia and the fund that manages the private wealth of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos.
LeCun says LLMs are extremely good at coding, mathematical problems and generating text, but these are well-defined and predictable problems. “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 said.
Demonstrating the limitations, he held a pen upright and asked what happens when you let go. A toddler would know it falls, but no one could predict the direction. An LLM would try to generate a single prediction based on statistical patterns from its training data, which would almost certainly be wrong because the system is not reasoning about physical reality.
LeCun says his company’s system, Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), creates abstractions of the real world that allow it to assess the outcomes of actions, using difficult maths to filter out useless information.
The Bank of England’s warning underscores the potential risks as AI continues to advance, though LeCun’s remarks suggest the most widely used systems remain fundamentally limited in their intelligence.