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.
More from AGI Musings
- Investor: AI diffusion will be slowest in consumer software — Oura, Strava, Labcorp still have no real AI strategy — MartinGTobias · 2026-11-12
- On AI Progress: When Models Lag on Your Load-Bearing Skill, You Can't See Them Improving — dfrsrchtwts · 2026-11-12
- Slack's David Hoang: agents beat people on coordination, proposes 'boundary agents' — davidhoang · 2026-11-12
- CS student mourns coding flow states he'll never experience in the AI era — chrissyykat · 2026-11-12
- Ford's 370% Turnover Led to $5 Days — But ASI Never Quits — krishnan · 2026-11-12
- Against 'verifiable vs. fuzzy': the real axis is how expensive tasks are to grade — dfrsrchtwts · 2026-11-12