Chief AI Scientist, Meta/Independent
Yann LeCun 2026 NYU Tandon Commencement Speech
About Yann Lecun
Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner and former chief AI scientist at Meta, has been publicly advocating for an alternative approach to artificial intelligence that moves beyond large language models (LLMs). In talks and interviews from 2025 and 2026, LeCun described LLMs as useful for tasks like code generation and information access but argued they are not a path to human-level intelligence, stating that they lack the ability to predict the consequences of their actions and cannot handle the "messy" real world. He has promoted his Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and "world models" as a more promising direction, emphasizing that AI systems should learn abstract representations rather than generating pixel-level predictions. LeCun has also been critical of vision-language-action (VLA) models used in robotics, calling them "doomed" and asserting they do not work well without vast amounts of training data. LeCun left Meta in early 2026 and became executive chairman of a new company, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, which focuses on "physical AI" for robotics and industrial control. He also serves as chief scientific advisor to the Tapestry project, an open-source AI initiative under the AI Alliance that aims to collaboratively train foundation models without pooling private data. LeCun has argued that a diverse ecosystem of AI assistants is necessary to protect cultural and linguistic diversity, and that current models produced by a handful of companies pose risks to information diversity. He has described his mission as "protecting democracy" by ensuring people have access to a wide variety of information sources.
Transcript (2 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Narrator0:00
LeCun serves as the executive chairman of AMI Labs and the Jacob T. Schwarz professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Data Science and the NYU Tandon. LeCun was the chief AI scientist at Meta from 2018 to 2025, the founding director of Meta FAIR and of the NYU Center for Data Science. He received a Diplome d'Ingenieur from the ESIEE in Paris and a PhD from the Sorbonne University. After serving as a postdoc in Toronto, he joined the AT&T Bell Labs in 1988 and AT&T labs in 1996 as head of image processing research. He joined NYU as a professor in 2003 and Meta and Facebook in 2013. His interests include AI, machine learning, computer perception, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Touring Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yosua Benjio for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the French Academie des Sciences. Please welcome Yann LeCun to the podium.
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Yann Lecun1:31
Good morning everyone. How is everyone feeling? Yeah, you guys should be proud. I'm a proud engineer myself. I graduated in 1983 in France and I didn't go to a big name school. I went to a pretty good engineering school, a school that gave me enough time to actually pursue projects I was interested in. I was already interested in AI and machine learning at the time even though the field did not exist yet and the school let me actually work on this and that's where my career started really. I took interest in not just engineering but also research, and engineering is research. So I became also a scientist but I'm still an engineer at heart. So one thing all of you have learned about engineering is that engineering is a creative activity and in fact creation is what motivated me to become an engineer. There's creation, there is understanding, there's problem solving, but a lot of it is creation. And increasingly engineering is going to be a creative act. Why? Because increasingly machines are going to help us create. They're not going to create for us. They're going to help us create. And that's one thing I've been devoted my career to, which I say a few words about. Engineering is the best profession you can ever imagine doing. At least this the best profession I can imagine doing. In fact, I can't imagine doing anything else. I wouldn't be able to. First of all, but creating new things, inventing new things, producing things that did not exist before that help people around you, humanity perhaps, is kind of the one of the best ways you can have an impact, a positive impact on the world. And it's in your hands now. You can do it. You can build the world of tomorrow. It is a lot to build. Okay, I work on AI, a terrible confession to make. All right, and I work on this for three reasons and those are their roots again in this idea of creation. First of all, there is the scientific question of what is intelligence. So AI is not just producing artifacts. It's also kind of understanding ourselves, understanding where an intelligence came about, what are the essential principles behind it. Okay. But as an engineer, the only way to understand something is to build it. And so there is the technological challenge of building intelligent machines. And then of course there's no point doing all this unless you think it will have a positive impact on society and humanity as a whole. And it's one of those domains where you can basically do all three science engineering and societal impact. That's really something that all of us should aspire to. And in fact, one point I'm going to make is engineering is the best profession you can ever imagine. Stick to it. It's difficult to imagine that you might actually do something else. But engineering is the best way you can have an impact. Okay. So what about AI? Okay. A lot of people are sort of asking themselves questions about AI. What's going to be the impact of AI on society, on jobs, on everything. Okay, the first thing that one must realize is that, done right, AI is here to amplify human intelligence. Okay, it's going to make all of us smarter if we use it right. It's going to solve problems for us. It is going to help us access knowledge. It already does. I'm sure you've used it, right? Who has used AI in their studies? Okay, come on. Don't be shy. All right, I'm sure all of you have. Okay, so it was useful to you, right? It's going to be more useful in the future. It's not going to replace you. It's going to make you more productive. It's going to allow you all of us to focus on creation because actually building something is difficult and AI can help us with this. But we had to figure out what to build. An essential quality of engineers is not just to build things is to figure out what to build and that is properly humans and human activity. AI is not going to replace us for that. And you know we hear a lot of crazy talk about AI. It's going to take our job. It's going to make study points. No. It's going to make us stupid. No. People were saying this about books back in the days. This is all nonsense. Okay, jobs are going to change. But that's just the history of technological revolution. They've all changed jobs, including ours. The interesting part is that there's going to be more desire and more usefulness for creation in the future. And that's going to create more demand for more advanced degrees. So if you are asking yourself, should I go to grad school? If you are, if you're just graduating from a bachelor. The answer is absolutely yes. It's going to be more demand in the future for more advanced degrees because that's how you learn not just how to build, but what to build. That's how you learn to innovate as well. Now AI is going to change our activity as engineers. And it's going to make a lot of us turn into kind of managers of virtual teams where instead of doing all the activity ourselves, a lot of it is going to be done by AI. And so it's going to kind of multiply our impact, amplify our impact. And so all of you have a very bright future ahead of you. Okay, technological progress is accelerating and sometimes it makes us question whether we can keep up, makes me question whether I can keep up with AI or even with the narrow area of AI that I'm interested in. There's so much activity. But we can keep up. It's not a question of whether you can keep up. It's whether you can keep up with the rest of humanity. We all have limitations. So technology has an increasingly important role in society and in the economy. Most of the growth of the economy is due to technological innovation. Product innovation comes from technological innovation which is the role of engineers. Technological innovation comes from scientific breakthroughs which is the role of scientists of which some of whom are also engineers. As an engineer, you have agency in this transformation of society, in the acceleration of technological progress, in the acceleration of economic progress, in human progress generally and you are in the driver's seat. Congratulations. Okay, there's one thing I need to do. I'm wearing your smart glasses. I can take pictures of you. So, you guys got to smile. Okay. Smile. All right. Awesome. Best luck to your career.