Meta AI Chief Admits: Today's Chatbots Aren’t Truly Intelligent

At the AI Action Summit in Paris, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, made a bold statement: today's AI models — including popular chatbots — still fall short of true human-level intelligence.

Speaking to a global audience, LeCun outlined four key abilities that current language models don’t possess:

1. Long-term memory

2. Logical reasoning

3. Physical world understanding

4. Complex step-by-step planning

“These models are pattern-recognition machines,” LeCun said, emphasizing that while they can generate impressive responses, they don’t actually understand the world in the way humans do.

Meta’s “World-Based” AI Vision

To close that intelligence gap, Meta is rethinking AI from the ground up. LeCun revealed the company is developing “world-based” AI models — systems designed to understand real-world dynamics rather than just predict text.

Among Meta’s innovations:

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): This allows AI to pull external information in real-time for more accurate and context-aware responses.

• V-JEPA: A video-based model that learns by predicting missing parts of video sequences, helping AI build a better understanding of time, space, and cause-effect relationships.

LeCun believes this new approach could lead to AI that thinks more abstractly, anticipates real-world outcomes, and tackles complex problems — more like a human brain does.

Trouble Inside Meta’s AI Lab

But even as Meta pushes toward next-gen AI, it’s facing internal turbulence. The team behind 2023’s Llama model has thinned out. Of the original 14 researchers, just three remain at Meta. Several have left for fast-rising rivals like Mistral, a Paris-based AI startup making waves for its innovation.

Meanwhile, Meta’s newest model, Llama 4, hasn’t impressed the developer community. In contrast, AI models from OpenAI (GPT-4o), Google (Gemini 2.5 Pro), and Anthropic (Claude 4 Sonnet) are earning praise for their advanced reasoning and usability.

Adding to the pressure, Meta has delayed the launch of its upcoming flagship model, Llama 4 Behemoth, raising concerns about whether the company can keep pace in the rapidly evolving AI race.

What’s Next?

Meta is betting big on a new direction for AI — one where systems truly understand the world, not just mimic language. But with top talent leaving and rivals surging ahead, it faces a tough challenge: Can it stay relevant in the next era of AI?

Only time — and innovation — will tell.