Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and longtime leader in Artificial Intelligence research, is doubling down on his contrarian stance against the industry’s fixation on large language models. He argues that the current obsession with these systems is wrong-headed and will not solve many pressing problems, and instead promotes world models, a different class of Artificial Intelligence designed to capture and predict the dynamics of the real world. LeCun has recently left Meta, where he served as chief scientist for FAIR (Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research), the influential research lab he founded, and in an exclusive interview from his apartment in Paris he discussed his new venture, life after Meta, and why he believes the Artificial Intelligence field is chasing the wrong ideas.
The newsletter also turns to the global race around critical minerals, focusing on why 2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for lithium. The author plans to watch the price of lithium closely, noting that this metal is essential for lithium-ion batteries that power phones, laptops, electric vehicles, and large-scale energy storage arrays on the grid. Prices have swung sharply in recent years and are ticking up again, and what happens next could shape investment decisions in mining and battery technology, with knock-on effects for both the clean energy transition and geopolitics. This analysis originally appeared in a climate-focused newsletter that tracks technologies aimed at addressing the climate crisis.
Beyond Artificial Intelligence and lithium, the newsletter highlights a range of tech stories, from reports that Apple is working on a wearable Artificial Intelligence pin and revamping Siri into an Artificial Intelligence chatbot, to debates over whether Artificial Intelligence actually boosts worker productivity. There are notes on geopolitical technology plays, including Trump’s shifting stance on Greenland and access to rare earths, and on space-based internet competition as Blue Origin prepares TeraWave satellites to rival Starlink. The edition closes with a climate feature on Sublime Systems, a startup developing an electrically driven process for cement production that could cut emissions from a sector responsible for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide output, while facing the challenge of competing with entrenched cement producers and convincing builders to adopt new materials.
