Yann LeCun

I do not write posts on X. I tweet links to posts on other platforms. I like and retweet (occasionally) I comment on friends' tweets (rarely) Follow me on...⬇️⬇️⬇️

Aligned with @matanSF's intuition that in the next 12 months, 90% of tokens could be going to open models. We're seeing more and more companies using frontier APIs for experimenting and open-source or private models for production and larger workloads!

We kneecapped our own American chip companies with export controls. We had 100% of the market and China had a bunch of bloated, bedsore, state sponsored companies doing piss poor chip design. So we did we do? Killed our own market dominance through a self-own and lit a fire under Chinese scientists and engineers and made the Chinese state see our chip dominance as an existential threat and now they're roaring ahead. Soon there will be two stacks in the world. If the US further isolates and bans or limits Chinese models to favor our incumbents, then the rest of the world will standardize on the Chinese software and chip stack while we pay exorbitant token prices and fall behind faster and faster. We're ahead now with closed but open wins in the end. It out scales. It swarms. It grows through sheer wide distribution, starting out worse and then getting better and better. The cloud and mass scale came through tech like Linux and Kubernetes and Docker and Postgress, not Windows and Oracle. We won the American century with openness and having the most innovative companies in the world distributing their tech far and wide. We're going to lose with closed and protectionist, if we don't wake up fast.

Why would the Pentagon be involved in domestic political activities? Unless, of course, this is all more bullshit to fund and enable Trump‘s personal federal shock troops, the equivalent of Putin’s Rosgvardiya, and crack down on elections and any domestic opposition.

US inflation is the highest in the G7.

New @wapo story today, the Trump family has secured about $3.2 billion in Pentagon contracts for firms which they are involved in. This is the tip of the iceberg in the largest corruption saga in US history.

1) If you haven't read AI as Normal Technology, these annotated slides are probably the easiest way to get a high-level overview. cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks… 2) If you're already familiar with the core ideas, Part 1 of the talk is largely a summary of what I and @sayashk have already written, while Parts 2 and 3 have new ideas. There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in the discourse about Recursive Self-Improvement and I hope you find my pushback interesting. 3) I'm really grateful to the team (@steverab @sayashk @PKirgis & Felix Chen) for feedback on the talk. In my first version, Part 2 was about 3x too long and I was super frustrated with myself. They encouraged me to cut it down ruthlessly and turn the full version into essays on the newsletter, so that's what I plan to do! (normaltech.ai) 4) I've received a few requests for the video. There's a video on the ICML website, but it is login-walled icml.cc/virtual/2026/i… (I assume it's for ICML registrants only). Last year's videos are public, so presumably @icmlconf will make it public at some point.

Independence is a choice — and one of the most important ones we’ve made at @photoroom_ML . We partner with the biggest labs when it’s the right move. But we also train our own open-source foundation model: PRX, a text-to-image model built in Europe with the support of the French government through France 2030. That combination is the whole point. Independence isn’t about doing everything yourself. It’s about control and choice. Using the best available technology when it makes sense, while owning the parts that truly matter: the architecture, the training design, and the full data pipeline underneath. This independence is what keeps us future-proof. It means we can always offer our users the best possible solution, no matter what comes next.Our team just released Part 4 of the PRX series, diving deep into the least glamorous but most critical piece: the data.We share how we build a broad, diverse corpus, re-caption every image with a VLM, and stream it efficiently at 7B scale. One detail I particularly love: the pipeline is designed so we can honor a user’s opt-out decision at any time, without having to rewrite terabytes of data. Control isn’t just something we keep for ourselves; it’s something we give back to the people who trust us. PRX is open source (Apache 2.0). You can read the full pipeline, run the model, and even spot our bugs. Article linked in the first comment. Huge congrats to @jon_almazan and @DavidBert7 and the whole team! Thanks for the support @julien_c @ylecun @ClemDelangue @Thom_Wolf

Keep in mind that Trump‘s persistent delusion and propaganda that 2020 was stolen is essential pretext to his attempting to interfere in the midterms and 2028. He’s been laying that ground since the day he was reelected. Wake up.

Oil prices are up nearly $4.50 since Trump scrapped the MoU with Iran. Without a deal, the market is pricing in elevated oil prices through 2030. The margin of increase will likely go up if there is no progress on negotiations in the coming weeks.

@elonmusk Total BS argument. You don't understand QM. The "simulation hypothesis" question is the new "sex and angels" debate. Just as pointless.

Consistent with the simulation hypothesis. Like a video game, objects are randomly generated, with positional certainty only when observed.

"The role of raw power in intelligence", Hans Moravec, 1976 (!). "The first section discusses natural intelligence, and notes two major branches of the animal kingdom in which it evolved independently, and several offshoots. The suggestion is that intelligence need not be so difficult to construct as is sometimes assumed. The second part compares the information processing ability of present computers with intelligent nervous systems, and finds a factor of one million difference. This abyss is interpreted as a major distorting influence in current work, and a reason for disappointing progress. Section three examines the development of electronics, and concludes the state of the art can provide more power than is now available, and that the gap could be closed in a decade." stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:ws5…

The Well Just Dropped: 15 Terabytes of Pure Physics Gold Is Now Open Source The scientific AI world just got a massive upgrade.Polymathic AI, in collaboration with the Flatiron Institute and researchers from Princeton, Cambridge, NYU, Berkeley, Los Alamos, and more, has released The Well: a staggering 15TB collection of high-fidelity physics simulations. This isn’t toy data. These are real, expensive-to-run simulations across 16 different physical domains, including turbulent fluid dynamics, supernova explosions, magneto-hydrodynamic cosmic flows, acoustic scattering, and active biological matter. Until now, reproducing this level of data required weeks on national supercomputers and grant money most teams will never see. The Well changes everything. It’s purpose-built for training PDE surrogate models the AI systems that can replace slow, costly physics solvers with a single fast neural network forward pass. Everything is fully open source, easy to load with PyTorch, and ready to drop straight into your training pipeline. Researchers and builders can now train on world-class physics data without the insane compute barriers that used to stand in the way. This is more than just another dataset drop. It’s a serious accelerator for scientific machine learning.The future of physics-informed AI just got a whole lot more accessible.Get it here: polymathic-ai.org/the_well/

@AriDotnow @KenRoth I worked at AT&T Bell Labs from 1988 to 1995, the AT&T Labs-Research from 1996 to 2002. Xerox, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, plus Meta and Google until recently, could afford advanced research labs because they were de facto monopolies.

@ylecun @KenRoth weren't bell labs and xerox the best most innovative places?

Trump’s cuts in funding for higher education is reducing the number of PhD candidates and “raising fears that the nation’s capacity to produce new science could be diminished.” trib.al/TzuHUm6

@d_comfe Approved 😁

I am coining a new word - Yanntificate. To espouse and communicate sensible AI policy.

@Plinz @skinnybobinfo @MarkWarner @Kasparov63 It was a abysmally incompetent coup attempt. But it was a coup attempt.

@skinnybobinfo @ylecun @MarkWarner @Kasparov63 While I think that the administration represents rock bottom and does not bode well for the future of US democracy, I don't think you can perform a coup by letting some hillbillies walk through a public building. You need a military takeover. Jan 6 being a coup is a BluAnon meme.

Reports that the White House has dismissed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — all of whom were unanimously confirmed by the Senate, including a commissioner appointed by President Trump himself — should concern every American, regardless of party, because the EAC was established by Congress as an independent, bipartisan body to help states administer secure and credible elections. If these reports are accurate, removing every remaining commissioner just months before the 2026 midterm elections is an extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections.

All foundation models are in fact models of knowledge, mainly based on open knowledge already developed by mainkind. Obviously knowledge (models) of mankind should be open sourced! (Again, please do not confuse knowledge with intelligence.)

History has seen this movie before. 1880s Late Imperial Russia: Fear of dissent led to tighter control over universities. That alienated students and scholars, weakened trust in the state, and produced more dissent. 1930s Nazi Germany: Fear of disloyalty led to purges, banned ideas, and loyalty tests. That drove out talent, weakened universities, and made the regime even more dependent on loyalty over truth. 1960s China’s Cultural Revolution: Fear of independent thought led to attacks on teachers, schools, and universities. The result was an entire Lost Generation. The spiral: Fear brings control. Control drives out talent. Lost talent weakens education. Weaker education weakens the state. A weaker state becomes more fearful—and tightens control again.

This is total insanity. Words fail to explain how anyone let alone a plurality of voters thought giving an obviously demented person control of the most powerful government in the world was a good idea. We will be lucky to come out the other side of this alive.