Yann LeCun, a leading figure in artificial intelligence who left Meta in 2025 and founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), argues that current AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are not a path towards human-level or animal-like intelligence because they cannot deal with real-world data. Speaking at VivaTech in France, LeCun stated that these systems "basically just accumulate knowledge" and "don't have an underlying understanding." Paris-based AMI Labs is developing a new type of AI called Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), which creates abstractions of the real world to assess outcomes of actions, unlike Large Language Models that generate statistically plausible but often wrong predictions. Earlier this year, AMI Labs announced it had raised more than $1bn (£760m) in seed funding, one of the biggest such rounds in Europe, with investors including Nvidia and the fund managing Jeff Bezos's private wealth.