Elon Musk makes fun of former Meta AI scientist Yann LeCun on robotics, ‘Godfather of AI’ responds: You know I can do it, I know how to do it…

Elon Musk and former chief scientist of Meta AI, Yann LeCun, have once again engaged in an online feud. LeCun, who is also one of the three ‘Godfathers of AI’, said in an interview that companies making humanoid robots do not have any idea how to make them smart enough to be useful. This appears to have triggered Musk whose Tesla is developing Optimus humanoid robots, prompting the response from the billionaire.

The exchange began after LeCun questioned the current state of robotics, suggesting that the what Tesla robots can do is precomputed and they need to capture a lot of data to be able to have human-level intelligence.




“They [Humanoid robots] need, you know, exotic sensors, but it's expensive in the sense that how is it that a 17-year-old can learn to drive in, 10 to 20 hours of practice and we have millions of hours of training data that we could, in principle, train a machine learning system by imitation to imitate human drivers, but that doesn't work. You don't get reliable driving systems this way,” he said in a recent interview.

Yann LeCun: ‘None of them have any idea…’

LeCun argued that the robotics industry is currently hitting a wall similar to the one faced by self-driving cars. He said that despite millions of hours of training data, machines still struggle to match the “common sense” of a housecat.

“And so that sort of leads me to another statement about robotics. There's a lot of companies building humanoid robots and they do those kinds of you know they play kung fu and you know impressive thing. This is all precomputed. None of those companies, absolutely none of them, has any idea how to make those robots smart enough to be useful. That's a big secret of robotics industry. You can't train them on very narrow tasks and you have to to collect lots and lots of data,” LeCun added.

“The same way people thought they would build self-driving cars and it's expensive and it's only practical for a small number of narrow tasks and you don't have robots that have nearly as good as a common sense as your housecat let alone human intelligence,” he pointed out.

Elon Musk responds, Yann LeCun hits back

An X (formerly Twitter) user, shared the clip, saying, “Why is Yann such a Negative Nancy all the time?”. Musk responded by a dismissive jab, “He thinks if he can’t do it, no one can.”

LeCun did not back down, and turned the argument to his specialised research into Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and World Models.

“Actually, quite the opposite. I know I can do it and I know how to do it. Just not with the techniques everyone is currently betting on. My bet is (famously) on JEPA, world models, and planning. At some point, you'll realize I'm right,” he said.

Previously, LeCun stated that tech giantsare becoming “LLM-piled”, warning that stealing each other’s talent will serve only as a blockade to innovation as “they’re all doing the same thing.”