Comment by _giorgio_
14 hours ago
During his years at Meta, LeCun failed to deliver anything that delivered real value to stockholders, and may have demotivated people working on LLMs—he repeatedly said, "If you are interested in human-level AI, don’t work on LLMs."
His stance is understandable, but hardly the best way to rally a team that needs to push current tech to the limit.
The real issue: Meta is *far behind* Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
A radical shift is absolutely necessary - regardless of how much we sympathize with LeCun’s vision.
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According to Grok, these were LeCun's real contributions at Meta (2013–2025):
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- PyTorch – he championed a dynamic, open-source framework; now powers 70%+ of AI research
- LLaMA 1–3 – his open-source push; he even picked the name
- SAM / SAM 2 – born from his "segment anything like a baby" vision
- JEPA (I-JEPA, V-JEPA) – his personal bet on non-autoregressive world models
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Everything else (Movie Gen, LLaMA 4, Meta AI Assistant) came after he left or was outside his scope.
I am in the "Yann is no longer the right person for the job" camp and I yet "LeCun failed to deliver anything that delivered real value to stockholders" is a wild thing to say. How do you read the list you compiled and say otherwise?
LLAMA sucks, that's the problem. Do you see value in it?
Pytorch, used by everyone, yet no real value to stockholders, META even "fired" the creator of pytorch days ago.
SAM is great, what value does it bring to META business? Nobody knows about it. Great tool BTW.
JEPA is a failure (will it get better? I hope so.)
Did you read my list?
Okay. Now explain the value that a halo car brings to car companies.
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I think there’s something to be said for keeping up in the LLM space even if you don’t think it’s the path to AGI.
Skills may transfer to other research areas, lessons may be learnt, closing the feedback loop with usage provides more data and opportunities for learning. It also creates a culture where bullshit isn’t possible, as the thing has to actually work. Academic research often ends up serving no one but the researchers, because there is little or no incentive to produce real knowledge.
> LeCun failed to deliver anything that delivered real value to stockholders
Well, no, Meta is behind the main framework used by nearly anyone largely thanks to LeCun. LLaMA was also very significant in making open weight a thing and that largely contributed to avoiding Google and OpenAI consolidating as the sole providers.
It's not a perfect tenure but implying he didn't deliver anything is far too harsh.