Yann LeCun: Silicon Valley is 'completely hypnotized by LLMs' while Asia races ahead on world models

Speaking remotely at the Evident AI Symposium 2026, AMI Labs executive chairman Yann LeCun told Evident co-founder and co-CEO Alexandra Mousavizadeh that large language models remain fundamentally limited when it comes to reasoning and planning in the physical world. "We still don't have domestic robots. We don't even have level five self-driving cars," he said.

AMI Labs today

LeCun said the Paris-headquartered company started operations in March, has major offices in Paris and New York and smaller ones in Montreal and Singapore, and employs around 65 people. He described its roughly $1B seed raise as, to his knowledge, the largest seed round in history outside the US, and said the company anticipates some success in various industries over the next year or so.

World models and JEPA

LeCun defined a world model as a system that, given the state of the world and an imagined action, predicts the resulting state, which can then be used to plan a sequence of actions. AMI's JEPA (joint embedding predictive architecture) is not generative: it predicts in an abstract representation space and ignores details that cannot be predicted. He drew a parallel with finance, where data is "mostly noise with a little bit of information in it", and mentioned a just-published paper on hierarchical world models for long-horizon planning. His long-term proof point: a humanoid robot that can handle tasks a 10-year-old can do without explicit training.

China and Asia

Asked about geopolitics, LeCun said China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan are pushing hard on robotics and physical AI because of their manufacturing strength, and that much of the published work on world models and joint-embedding methods comes from Asia, China in particular. In his view they are catching up "much faster than Silicon Valley, which seems completely hypnotized by LLMs".

Source

Yann LeCun, AMI Labs | Evident AI Symposium 2026 (Evident Insights on YouTube, 27 October 2026)