Yann LeCun blasts Musk’s xAI, says labs are risking ‘bubble explosion’
Elon Musk’s xAI is a “failure” to compete on the AI frontier, AMI Labs founder Yann LeCun told CNBC as he gave his view on what could lead to a “massive bubble burst” in the industry.
LeCun’s comments renew a long-running dispute with Musk and cast doubt on the valuations of some of the world’s largest artificial intelligence companies.
Previously LeCun Meta’The chief AI scientist has clashed with Musk over the past few years on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to what he describes as his own. Tesla’s CEO’s “conspiracy theories” on social media. Musk, on the other hand, accused LeCun of being “away from artificial intelligence for a long time.”
LeCun is often referred to as the “Godfather of Artificial Intelligence” for his early work in this field.
“XAI is obviously kind of a failure because the founding team left,” LeCun said.
“Elon is in a very, very difficult position right now for him to hire the best people in AI because he just kind of, you know, didn’t have very good attitudes towards the previous team.”
Over the past year, many of xAI’s co-founders have left the organization. Musk merged in February SpaceX A huge deal was made with xAI, valuing the company at $1.25 trillion.
In the three months ending March 31, SpaceX’s artificial intelligence segment, which includes xAI, reported a $2.5 billion loss from its operations. Meanwhile, AMI Labs raised $1 billion in a funding round in March to pursue world models. pre-money valuation 3.5 billion dollars.
Elon Musk and Yann LeCun.
David Swanson | Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
LeCun said xAI has a “huge infrastructure” that it leases to other companies, “because that’s the only way to do it.” [Musk] can cover the cost.”
LeCun’s comments about infrastructure reference xAI’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis, Tennessee. Both Google and Anthropic have leased computing capacity in xAI’s data centers.
“I’m not very positive about the future of xAI,” LeCun said, adding that he doesn’t expect xAI to be able to compete with heavyweights OpenAI and Anthropic.
SpaceX and xAI were not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
‘Big balloon explosion’
Corporate spending on artificial intelligence has arrived The technology has been under scrutiny in recent months as it turned out to be more expensive than expected. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly said during a company livestream this month that companies are now discussing how much they spend on AI. Altman said AI costs are a “big problem.”
“Prices for AI services are rising, but the cost of running them is falling, but not fast enough. So all these companies are losing money, and basically most people’s use is funded by investors. This can’t go on for very long, right?” LeCun said.
The AMI Labs founder added that labs like OpenAI and Anthropic “are going to have to raise prices, they’re going to have to cut costs, otherwise there’s going to be a big bubble burst.”
LeCun has been a vocal critic of the limitations of large language models, or LLMs, that are the basis of the current generation of leading AI products. LeCun instead advocates for “world models.”
Master of Laws learns language patterns to predict what will happen next; this makes them well-suited for reasoning and coding. World models take a different approach by trying to build an understanding of how the real or simulated world works. This includes objects, causes, consequences and actions.
“Personally, I don’t think we’ll have generalized reliable agent systems until we’re based on world models,” LeCun said.
AI companies from Anthropic to OpenAI are focusing on AI agents, which are systems that can perform more complex tasks autonomously.
LeCun said Masters’ degrees are useful for fields like coding or math. But “the cost of running these systems with this kind of performance is very high compared to the amount of money users are willing to pay,” he said.
