Elon Musk spent portion of his Memorial Day holiday exchanging barbs with Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun on X, widening rift between the billionaire tech magnate and the acclaimed scientist as he endeavors to recruit talent for his AI startup, xAI.

KEY FACTS

• LeCun posted on X that people should join xAI (Musk’s AI startup), only if they can “stand a boss” who “spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories” and makes hyped-up assertions that what you’ll be working on “will be solved next year (no pressure)” and “will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).”
• The scientist’s condemnation of Musk was in response to the tech magnate’s request to people to come and work at xAI “if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe,” something he said “requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.”
• When queried what he has against Musk, LeCun said “I like his cars, his rockets, his solar panels, and his satellite network,” but very much dislikes “his vengeful politics, his conspiracy theories, and his hype.”
• When LeCun stated he chose to work at Meta instead of starting his own company because “I’m a scientist, not a business or product person,” Musk enquired “what “science” have you done in the past 5 years,” dismissing LeCun’s over 80 published technical papers since 2022 as “nothing.”
• “You’re going soft. Try harder,” Musk nudged, adding that LeCun is “just following orders,” inviting a rejoinder of “now you’re acting as if you were my boss.”
• LeCun stated “you don’t seem to understand how research works” and later added that “every single driving assistance system today” relies on research — convolutional neural networks — he introduced, including Musk’s EV firm Tesla, though the billionaire said they “don’t use CNNs much these days.”

LeCun is a prominent computer scientist

LeCun is a top computer scientist widely recognizedas one of the three “AI godfathers” for his foundational role in the fieldand so is very influential. Apart from leading Meta’s AI efforts, where he claims they are pursuing a new generation of AI systems based on a “world modeling” approach, LeCun is also an academic at New York University. He has feuded in public with Musk even before, including advising the billionaire to distance himself from then-President Trump in 2017 and rebuffing his vision for the future trajectory of AI in March, when he stated we are still “really far from human-level intelligence.” The latest quarrel comes as Musk works to entice AI talent to xAI in an attempt to compete with the likes of OpenAI, Meta, Google and other leaders in the field following a Series B funding round fetching in $6 billion.

LeCun seems amused with whole online feud with Musk

LeCun seems to have found the whole online feud with Musk funny. When one X user labeled the spat as a poor look for the two tech giants and stated they would certainly have something better to do with their time, LeCun informed he was “On a holiday? During which I was stuck on an 8 hour transatlantic flight with free wifi? Pretty entertaining, I’d say.”