July 3, 2026
Mouse 1, Chatbot 0
AI is 'not smart' so what's next in artificial intelligence?
AI genius says chatbots aren’t really smart — and the comments went feral
TLDR: Yann LeCun says today’s popular AI chatbots can sound impressive but still don’t truly understand the physical world, and his new startup has raised over $1 billion to try a different approach. Commenters were split between agreeing this is obvious, mocking it as sour grapes, and joking that by this logic a mouse is smarter than a chatbot.
The big headline from VivaTech is deliciously blunt: AI heavyweight Yann LeCun says today’s chatbot boom is not actually intelligence. In his view, tools like ChatGPT can spit out convincing answers, code, and essays, but they still don’t understand the real world the way even a tiny animal can. His new company, AMI Labs, has already pulled in more than $1 billion to build something he says could handle messy real-life tasks like housework and robotics instead of just producing polished text.
But the real fireworks were in the community reaction. One camp basically shrugged and said, yes, that’s the point: these systems are great at pattern-matching, especially when they’ve seen loads of examples. Another camp went full doom-comedy with the two-word drive-by: “AI winter.” And then came the personality drama. One commenter instantly guessed the quote had to be LeCun, calling him a “bitter scientist” upset he got left behind by the chatbot revolution. Ouch.
The hottest debate? What even counts as “smart” anymore. One commenter joked that if “smart” now means moving around in 3D space without face-planting, then apparently a mouse beats a chatbot. That sparked the most deliciously existential vibe in the thread: are humans changing the definition of intelligence because chatbots got weirdly good at language? Meanwhile, the nerd corner tossed in niche guesses about what comes next, but the crowd mood was clear: half fascinated, half skeptical, and fully ready for a fight.
Key Points
- •Yann LeCun says current large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are useful for some tasks but are not capable of delivering human-like or animal-like intelligence in real-world settings.
- •After leaving Meta in 2025, LeCun founded Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs to develop a different AI approach.
- •AMI Labs said earlier this year that it raised more than $1bn in seed funding from investors including Nvidia and a fund managing Jeff Bezos’s private wealth.
- •LeCun says AMI Labs’ Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture is designed to build abstractions of the world and better assess possible outcomes of actions.
- •The article links this debate to robotics, where household-task training remains difficult and costly, and includes support from Oxford’s Ingmar Posner for AI systems that can explain causes and relevance.