What are Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei doing to make LLM obsolete?

After Meta lured back a wave of top engineers with compensation packages worth hundreds of millions, its Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, seemed fed up — and resigned.

He reportedly wasn’t keen to work under Alex Wang, the 28-year-old rising star who just took the title of Chief of AI.

Now, LeCun is starting a new company focused on a completely different direction in AI: World Models.

Coincidentally, Fei-Fei Li — often called the Godmother of AI — has also launched a startup pursuing the same idea.

Both believe that LLMs (Large Language Models) are reaching their limits — powerful but ultimately a dead end.

And when those limits hit, today’s AI giants will face a new headache.

So, what is a World Model?

It’s when machines don’t just see — they understand the world.

After a decade dominated by data and text, a new wave of AI is emerging: systems that build internal models of reality, allowing them to understand, predict, and even imagine — much like humans do.

LeCun is leaving Meta to focus fully on this, and Fei-Fei Li is advancing perception research through video. Both aim to give machines real-world understanding.

Here’s the fun twist, I think:

While most carmakers built self-driving systems with LiDAR — expensive 3D laser sensors that “see” the world directly — Elon Musk chose the hardest path: vision only.

For years, LiDAR-based teams (including giants like Google Waymo) mocked Tesla’s video approach — too low accuracy, too lighting-dependent, too hard.

Each LiDAR car costs tens of thousands more, but it’s “easier” since the sensor does most of the perception.

Meanwhile, Tesla has spent almost a decade wrestling with the hardest challenge in AI: building a Large Vision Model trained on millions of hours of real-world driving video.

Painful, expensive, and slow — but that’s exactly the foundation of a true world model.

Now, as the global AI community starts asking “What is a World Model?”, Tesla has already been living it for nearly ten years.

So laugh at Elon if you like — but history shows that when he picks the hard path, he often ends up years ahead. His street-smart spirit pays off quite frequently.

Author

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