Artificial intelligence is not yet as smart as a dog, Meta A.I. chief says
Chief AI Scientist at Meta Yann LeCun spoke at the Viva Tech conference in Paris and said that artificial intelligence does not currently have human-level intelligence but could do one day.
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Current artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT do not have human-level intelligence and are barely smarter than a dog, Meta’s AI chief said, as the debate over the dangers of the fast-growing technology rages on.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is based on a so-called large language model. This means that the AI system was trained on huge amounts of language data that allows a user to prompt it with questions and requests, while the chatbot replies in language we understand.
The fast-paced development of AI has sparked concern from major technologists that, if unchecked, the technology could pose dangers to society. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said this year that AI is “one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization.”
At the Viva Tech conference on Wednesday, Jacques Attali, a French economic and social theorist who writes about technology, said whether AI is good or bad will depend on its use.
“If you use AI to develop more fossil fuels, it will be terrible. If you use AI [to] develop more terrible weapons, it will be terrible,” Attali said. “On the contrary, AI can be amazing for health, amazing for education, amazing for culture.”
At the same panel, Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, was asked about the current limitations of AI. He focused on generative AI trained on large language models, saying they are not very intelligent, because they are solely coached on language.
“Those systems are still very limited, they don’t have any understanding of the underlying reality of the real world, because they are purely trained on text, massive amount of text,” LeCun said.
“Most of human knowledge has nothing to do with language … so that part of the human experience is not captured by AI.”
LeCun added that an AI system could now pass the Bar in the U.S., an examination required for someone to become an attorney. However, he said AI can’t load a dishwasher, which a 10-year old could “learn in 10 minutes.”
“What it tells you we are missing something really big … to reach not just human level intelligence, but even dog intelligence,” LeCun concluded.
Meta’s AI chief said the company is working on training AI on video, rather than just on language, which is a tougher task.
In another example of current AI limitations, he said a five-month-old baby would look at an object floating and not think too much of it. However, a nine-month year old baby would look at this item and be surprised, as it realizes that an object shouldn’t float.
LeCun said we have “no idea how to reproduce this capacity with machines today. Until we can do this, we are not going to have human-level intelligence, we are not going to have dog level or cat level [intelligence].”
Will robots take over?
Striking a pessimistic tone about the future, Attali said, “It is well known mankind is facing many dangers in the next three or four decades.”
He noted climate disasters and war among his top concerns, also noting he is worried that robots “will turn against us.”
During the conversation, Meta’s LeCun said that, in the future, there will be machines that are more intelligent than humans, which should not be seen as posing a danger.
“We should not see this as a threat, we should see this as something very beneficial. Every one of us will have an AI assistant … it will be like a staff to assist you in your daily life that is smarter than yourself,” LeCun said.
The scientist added that these AI systems need to be created as “controllable and basically subservient to humans.” He also dismissed the notion that robots would take over the world.
“A fear that has been popularized by science fictions [is], that if robots are smarter than us, they are going to want to take over the world … there is no correlation between being smart and wanting to take over,” LeCun said.
Ethics and regulation of A.I.
While looking at the dangers and opportunities of AI, Attali concluded that there need to be guardrails in place for the development of the technology. But he was unsure who would do that.
“Who is going to put the borders?,” he asked.
AI regulation has been a hot topic at Viva Tech. The European Union is pushing forward with its own AI legislation, while France’s top government ministers told CNBC this week that the country wants to see global regulation of the technology.
Alibaba‘s Hong Kong-listed shares surged on Wednesday to reach their highest point since 2021 after the company said it will invest more in artificial intelligence and rolled out new AI products and updates.
Shares of the company jumped over 6%, while its total gains year to date rose above 107%.
The tech giant plans to increase spending on AI models and infrastructure development, on top of the 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years it announced in February, Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said Wednesday at Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship technology conference.
“We are vigorously advancing a three-year, 380 billion [yuan] AI infrastructure initiative with plans to sustain and further increase our investment according to our strategic vision in anticipation of the [artificial superintelligence] era,” Wu said.
Alibaba shares surge after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending
So-called ‘artificial superintelligence’ refers to AI that would hypothetically surpass the power and intelligence of the human brain, with the hypothetical benchmark becoming a growing focus of major AI companies.
Alibaba also officially unveiled the latest version of its Qwen large language models — the Qwen3-Max — on Wednesday, along with a series of other updates to its suite of AI product offerings.
Wu highlighted that Alibaba Cloud is strategically positioned as a “full-stack AI service provider,” delivering the computing power required for training and deploying large AI models on the cloud through its own data centers.
“The cumulative investment in global AI in the next five years will exceed $4 trillion, and this is the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history,” he added.
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.
The stock rose in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
- Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected
Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.
The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.
Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.
“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.
Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.
However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.
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