In an unusually forward appraisal of an AI competitor, AMI Labs’ founder and former head of AI at Meta Yann Lecun has lambasted xAI. The latter, now part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has been left without its founders, which LeCun sees as caused by Musk’s purportedly bad behavior.
LeCun has fairly regularly been at odds with Musk, citing the world’s first trillionaire’s social media comments and his stance on AI. Musk’s treatment of former xAI staffers is also making life difficult for him, LeCun believes. “Elon is now in a position that is very, very difficult for him to kind of hire top people in AI,” he said. “Because he’s kind of, you know, not behaved in sort of very good ways toward the previous team.”
No OpenAI-Anthropic fight expected
LeCun does not expect xAI to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic at the frontier. Grok, the AI model series built by xAI, has not yet been widely adopted by enterprises, which has been a particularly successful discipline for Anthropic’s Claude LLMs.
xAI merged with SpaceX in February in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. Rather than becoming a leading model developer, xAI now rents out compute capacity from its Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis, Texas to other companies, including Google and Anthropic. Google is paying SpaceX $920 million per month for GPU compute capacity under a deal running to 2029. SpaceX’s AI segment posted a $2.5 billion operating loss in Q1 2026.
LeCun’s efforts
Yann LeCun is among a rare group of individuals known as a ‘godfather’ of AI. It seems media headlines pick whichever figure is at hand to label them as such, but Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio tend to be the others. They and LeCun were all recognized with the 2018 Turing Award (known as the effective “Nobel Prize of computing” as The Verge highlights). Go back in time far enough and Alan Turing is often listed as another, more primordial AI forefather.
At any rate, LeCun has mostly earned this title through his work on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in the late 1990s. “LeNet” has been used extensively, really just about anywhere structured data can be organized and divided based on patterns, either prescribed or discovered by the CNN.
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