Yann LeCun, former Chief AI Scientist at Meta and the “Godfather of AI”, has crticised the Silicon Valley giants, describing the industry as “LLM-pilled”. He warned that LeCun warned that the talent war between tech giants where they are hiring AI researchers is being used as a strategic weapon to stifle innovation as they are doing the same thing.“The AI industry is completely LLM-pilled, as they say. And in Silicon Valley, everybody is working on the same thing. They’re all digging the same trench. They are stealing each other’s engineers so that they they can’t afford to do something different, because if they start going on the tangent. They’re all doing the same thing,” he said in a talk whose video is being shared on the social media.
I left Meta because…: Yann LeCun clarifies why he quit
His comments came following his departure from Meta. Not just AI talent war, LeCun also critcised the AI industry’s overreliance on large language models (LLMs), noting that this is not enough to build superintelligence. LeCun said that even Meta’s engineers were also chasing the same narrow path, which prompted him tio quit and found a lab focused on predictive “world models.”“And it’s one big reason I left meta, right, because Meta also became very LLM-pilled. You know with sort of recent research thing, and it’s fine, you know, it’s a strategic decision that I cannot imagine that we can build agentic systems without those systems having an ability to predict in advance, what the consequences of their actions are going to be,” he said.He pointed out that a true agentic system – one that can take decisions on your behalf – cannot be build if it does not have the ability to predict the consequences, and that is not possible with LLMs.“We cannot build true agentic systems without the ability to predict the consequences of actions, just like humans do. Is that we know that we can predict the consequence? Consequences of our actions. And that’s where it allows us to plan,” he noted.LeCun’s exit from Meta appears to be the result of a massive internal restructuring. In June 2025, Mark Zuckerberg launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, a $14.3 billion project led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
