Turing award winner, Yann Lecun, doesn't believe that LLMs are the way

Cade Metz, An A.I. Pioneer Warns the Tech ‘Herd’ Is Marching Into a Dead End, NYTimes, Jan. 26, 2026.

But after leaving Meta in November, Dr. LeCun has become increasingly vocal in his criticism of Silicon Valley’s single-minded approach to building intelligent machines. He argues that the technology industry will eventually hit a dead end in its A.I. development — after years of work and hundreds of billions of dollars spent.

The reason, he said, goes back to what he has argued for years: Large language models, or L.L.M.s, the A.I. technology at the heart of popular products like ChatGPT, can get only so powerful. And companies are throwing everything they have at projects that won’t get them to their goal to make computers as smart as or even smarter than humans. More creative Chinese companies, he added, could get there first.

“There is this herd effect where everyone in Silicon Valley has to work on the same thing,” he said during a recent interview from his home in Paris. “It does not leave much room for other approaches that may be much more promising in the long term.”

That critique is the latest shot in a debate that has roiled the tech industry since OpenAI sparked the A.I. boom in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT: Is it possible to create so-called artificial general intelligence or even more powerful superintelligence? And can companies get there using their current technology and concepts?

Lecun is not worried about so-called "AI Doom":

Not long after ChatGPT was released, the two researchers who received the 2018 Turing Award with Dr. LeCun warned that A.I. was growing too powerful. Those scientists even warned that the technology could threaten the future of humanity. Dr. LeCun argued that was absurd.

“There was a lot of noise around the idea that A.I. systems were intrinsically dangerous and that putting them in the hands of everyone was a mistake,” he said. “But I have never believed in this.”

LLMs are not the way:

“L.L.M.s are not a path to superintelligence or even human-level intelligence. I have said that from the beginning,” he said. “The entire industry has been L.L.M.-pilled.”

During his last several years at Meta, Dr. LeCun worked on technology that tried to predict the outcome of its actions. That, he said, would allow A.I. to progress beyond the status quo. His new start-up will continue that work.

“This type of system can plan what it is going to do,” he said. “Current systems — L.L.M.s — absolutely cannot do that.”

Part of Dr. LeCun’s argument is that today’s A.I. systems make too many mistakes. As they tackle more complex tasks, he argued, mistakes pile up like cars after a collision on a highway.

There's more at the link.