Yann LeCun calls BS on Silicon Valley's AI supremacy narrative

Turing Award winner and former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has a message for anyone who thinks Silicon Valley has a monopoly on AI breakthroughs: bullshit.

LeCun took to X to publicly eviscerate prominent Silicon Valley investor Elad Gil, who had earlier posted an "AI hierarchy" claiming that researchers at elite labs with access to internal models are 3 to 4 months ahead of average SV engineers, who are themselves 3 to 6 months ahead of New York, which is 6 to 12 months ahead of the rest of the world. Gil warned that most people don't realize they're already 1 to 2 years behind state-of-the-art.

LeCun's response was characteristically blunt: "BS." Then he backed it up with a list of major AI innovations and their actual birthplaces:

• Attention mechanism: born in Montreal.
• PyTorch: born in New York.
• AlphaGo and AlphaFold: born in London.
• DeepSeek: born in Hangzhou.
• Meta's Llama 1 and 2: primarily developed in Paris and New York.
• DINO (a self-supervised computer vision model): born in Paris.
• JEPA (LeCun's pet "world model" architecture): developed across multiple locations.

LeCun closed with a sarcastic jab: Silicon Valley might be leading by 3 months — but only in "specific topics that it is unilaterally obsessed with."