Computer scientist Yann LeCun: “Intelligence really is about learning”

I arrive 10 minutes ahead of schedule from an early morning Eurostar and see Yann LeCun is already waiting for me, nestled between two plastic Christmas trees in the nearly empty winter garden of Michelin-starred restaurant Pavyllon. The restaurant is next to Paris’s Grand Palais, where President Emmanuel Macron kick-started 2025 by hosting an international AI summit, a glitzy showcase packed with French exceptionalism and international tech luminaries including LeCun, who is considered one of the “godfathers” of modern AI. LeCun gets up to hug me in greeting, wearing his signature black Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses. He looks well rested for a man who has spent nearly a week running around town plotting world domination. Or, more precisely, “total world assistance” or “intelligent amplification, if you want.” Domination “sounds scary with AI,” he acknowledges. The last time I met him was at a summer conference in Paris, where he was unveiling the latest iteration of his vision for superintelligent machines as Meta’s chief AI scientist. Now, he is preparing to leave his longtime employer, and fundraising for a new start-up that will bring that vision to life. LeCun’s schedule has been relentless since the Financial Times broke the news that he was leaving Meta. “It basically pushed us to accelerate the calendar,” he says. Macron sent him a WhatsApp message after the story came out. LeCun declines to tell me exactly what the president said, but does hint that he was pleased the new “worldwide” company will have a strong connection to France. I’m a scientist, a visionary… I’m pretty good at guessing what type of technology will work or not. But I can’t be a CEO LeCun will not be the company’s chief executive, but the executive chair, allowing him the same kind of freedom to do research that he had at Meta. (Since our lunch, the FT has reported that LeCun’s new venture is called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs and will be led by Alex LeBrun, the co-founder and chief executive of French health care AI start-up Nabla.)