LeCun denies urging halt to LLM R&D, says he pushed Meta to build Llama product division
ylecun · x · 2026-09-21
Yann LeCun publicly pushed back on claims that he asked to stop LLM R&D, calling them "BS":
- He says he never asked to halt LLM work and was supportive at Meta, citing his advocacy for Galactica (Nov 2022), open-sourcing OPT-175B (May 2022), and the Llama herd (mid 2023).
- He claims he was influential in convincing Meta leadership to start an AI-first product division built around Llama in January 2023.
- He maintains LLMs are impressive and useful, but have always been, in his view, an "off-ramp" on the path to human-level AI — not the destination.
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