AI ‘Godfather’ Yann LeCun wants AI to solve his ‘bedroom problem’
Yann LeCun desires AI models to perform physical tasks beyond writing essays. He aims to develop methods for AI to learn physical actions efficiently like humans. LeCun also disagrees with definitions of world models and VLMs used in robotics. He previously served as Meta's Chief AI Scientist for seven years. LeCun announced his departure from Meta after twelve years of service.
Yann LeCun, the former Chief AI scientist at Meta and widely regarded as the "Godfather of AI," has expressed his desire for AI models to tackle more than just language tasks. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), LeCun suggested that large language models (LLMs) should be able to perform physical work, such as cleaning someone's bedroom.
LeCun's comments came in response to a question posed by Paul Graham about what he would do if he were 17 years old. Graham wrote that he would learn how to build LLMs from scratch and train them to be as powerful as possible with the hardware available to him. LeCun replied that he would instead focus on understanding why LLMs can write essays but not clean bedrooms, and then study methods and architectures beyond LLMs that could enable rapid learning of physical tasks.
The AI expert's thoughts on the matter were echoed in a subsequent exchange with Amazon's robotics division head, Jitendra Malik, who had recently left Meta to join Amazon. Malik criticized the use of certain terms in robotics, such as VLMs (Visual Language Models) and World Models, arguing that they should be defined more precisely to avoid confusion. LeCun disagreed with Malik's definition and emphasized that world models are primarily concerned with dynamics, not just visual representation.
LeCun, a French-American computer scientist who is considered one of the pioneers of AI, won the 2018 Turing Award for his work on deep learning and convolutional neural networks. He has been at Meta for 12 years, having served as the Chief AI Scientist and a professor at New York University. In November 2025, LeCun announced his intention to leave Meta after a decade with the company, citing the significant impact of the FAIR (Facebook AI Research) division on the field of AI and the tech community.
Written by urgent.news from Times of India's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
