Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron
May 15, 2026 · 1 hr 22 min · 29 segments
Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Yann's contrarian thesis that LLMs are a dead-end on the path to human-level…
Yann LeCunGuestJacob EffronHostI think it'd be great to start with Ami, um, because the company feels like the clearest statement of your technical thesis going forward.
It's focused on world models, uh, and scaling the JEPA architecture, which you obviously pioneered, uh, over at Meta.
And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the origins of that architecture and the extent to which you drew inspiration from the human brain and the way that works.
They're just not a path towards human-level or human-like intelligence or even animal-like intelligence.
Uh, so that's my claim, okay? I'm not saying LLMs are useless, right? I'm, I'm just saying they're not a path towards, you know-
So what is, uh, Ami? So Ami really stands for Advanced Machine Intelligence, and the, the, the kind of subtitle, the motto, if you want, is, uh, AI for the real world.
So basically, a lot of, you know, AI techniques that people know about today are good for language manipulation, either human language or computer code or mathematics or, or legalese-
You know, language is very special in a way, and it's, uh, particularly well-suited for the type of, uh, you know, architectures that have been so successful, uh, recently, the, the, you know, large language models, GPT-style architectures.
I think it'd be great to start with Ami, um, because the company feels like the clearest statement of your technical thesis going forward.
It's focused on world models, uh, and scaling the JEPA architecture, which you obviously pioneered, uh, over at Meta.
And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the origins of that architecture and the extent to which you drew inspiration from the human brain and the way that works.
They're just not a path towards human-level or human-like intelligence or even animal-like intelligence.
Uh, so that's my claim, okay? I'm not saying LLMs are useless, right? I'm, I'm just saying they're not a path towards, you know-
So what is, uh, Ami? So Ami really stands for Advanced Machine Intelligence, and the, the, the kind of subtitle, the motto, if you want, is, uh, AI for the real world.
So basically, a lot of, you know, AI techniques that people know about today are good for language manipulation, either human language or computer code or mathematics or, or legalese-
You know, language is very special in a way, and it's, uh, particularly well-suited for the type of, uh, you know, architectures that have been so successful, uh, recently, the, the, you know, large language models, GPT-style architectures.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.