Yann LeCun, one of the “godfathers of AI,” is in something of a sweet spot professionally. He’s still well respected in the field he helped define; he’s free from the control of the big frontier labs that dominate the space; and his own project is so young that no one expects much of it yet. So he’s making the most of his freedom by taking shots at everyone else—especially Elon Musk.
In an interview with CNBC, LeCun decided to call it as he sees it—and it seems when he looks at xAI, he doesn’t see much worth respecting. “XAI is kind of a failure, frankly,” he told the outlet, citing the departure of basically every founding member not named Elon Musk. “Elon is now in a position that is very, very difficult for him to kind of hire top people in AI, because he’s kind of, you know, not behaved in sort of very good ways toward the… previous team.”
None of the xAI founders have really had much to say on their way out the door, but they all have headed for the door. The very last holdout of the original 11 who went in with Musk to start the AI lab, Ross Nordeen, was reportedly forced out by Musk, having his access to xAI systems abruptly cut off and getting unceremoniously removed from the company group chat.
LeCun also has not exactly had the most friendly of interactions with Musk in the past, so it’s reasonable enough that he just assumes he’s a dick to everyone. LeCun took a shot at how Musk runs his company back in 2024, only for Musk to basically ask who he is, which is not exactly a great look for someone working in the space that LeCun’s research made possible. Hard to say LeCun wasn’t proved right on the “Musk seems like a bad boss” front.
In LeCun’s view, xAI doesn’t seem like a meaningful player in the frontier lab space and is instead just a rent-a-data-center operation. “He’s got this huge infrastructure, which he rents to other people, because that’s the only way he can recoup the costs,” he said, before outright saying he doesn’t think xAI can compete with the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world.
Though, to be fair, LeCun doesn’t exactly think those companies are in a great spot, either. Not that they aren’t producing meaningful technology, but rather that the economic math is starting to get harder to solve. “The prices are going up of those AI services, but the cost of running them is going down, but not nearly fast enough,” LeCun said. “And so all of those companies are losing money, and basically, the use for most people is funded by the investors. That can’t go on for a very long, right?”
Hard to say if he’s right or not. Common sense would certainly suggest he is, but we went through the entire ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era, in which startups like Uber were able to price out competitors by burning through investor cash until it pushed out alternatives and then jacked up prices. We’re not in a zero-interest environment anymore, but these companies have been able to raise nearly endless money on bonkers valuations. SpaceX, which has not turned a profit and has a business model that includes going to Mars, keeps seeing its stock price climb since going public. We’re not exactly in a rational economy here.
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