Meta‘s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun has spent much of the past week sparring with Elon Musk over the Tesla CEO’s treatment of scientists and news organizations, and for spreading false conspiracies on social media.
“I like his cars (I own a 2015 S, and 2023 S), his rockets, his solar energy systems, and his satellite communication systems,” LeCun wrote about Musk on Sunday in a Post on X, the social media site that Musk owns. “But I very much disagree with him on a number of issues.”
The spat began days earlier, on May 27, after Musk took to X to encourage people to apply for roles at his AI startup, xAI. The company, which last week announced it had raised $6 billion, is in a battle for AI engineers with high-profile startups, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as top tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta.
Meta is trying to differentiate itself in the world of large language models, or LLMs, which have powered the recent boom in generative AI product development. While LLMs from xAI, OpenAI and Google are closed and proprietary for now, Meta is touting its Llama family of models as open source, meaning other researchers can copy, tweak or otherwise use them for their own AI initiatives.
In response to Musk’s promotional post, LeCun wrote, “Join xAI if you can stand a boss who makes promises that can’t be met, claims AI will ‘kill everyone’ and spews wild ‘conspiracy theories on his own social platform.'”
They continued going at it on Monday after Dr. Anthony Fauci testified publicly for the first time since leaving the government in 2022. Fauci appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, facing broad criticism from Republicans who have long claimed he lied about the genesis of Covid-19.
Musk, who has previously called for the prosecution of Fauci, posted on X, “Why do Dems love Fauci so much.” He also unfollowed LeCun.
In response to being unfollowed, LeCun wrote, “Must have been my tweet in defense of Anthony Fauci.”
He followed by writing, “Elon’s call for Fauci to be prosecuted and imprisoned is pretty high up on the scale of anti-science a–holery.”
While Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have engaged in a yearslong public dispute and were even goading each other for months last year about a possible cage match, few tech leaders have been willing to criticize Musk in the open or bet against his companies.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates previously shorted Tesla stock. Investor Mark Cuban criticized Musk over his opposition to corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. And Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has accused Tesla of consumer fraud.
In posts on X and LinkedIn over the weekend, LeCun said he disagrees with Musk’s secrecy when it comes to developing new technology and products and the “blatantly false” predictions he shares with the public, in addition to how he chooses to share “dangerous political opinions” and conspiracy theories.
Musk said in a post on X Monday that LeCun has been “out of touch with AI for a long time.” A Google Scholar link shared by LeCun indicates he has published 80 technical papers since January 2022.
LeCun and Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The “blatantly false” predictions LeCun referenced included Musk’s claims that artificial general intelligence would arrive next year and that Tesla would bring 1 million robotaxis to market by 2020.
The latter promise came on a call with investors in 2019. At the time, Musk said robotaxis would make Tesla a company worth $500 billion. Tesla’s market cap topped $1 trillion in 2021, but the company still hasn’t delivered a single robotaxi.
Musk has also shared lofty goals for his brain implant startup Neuralink. He’s claimed Neuralink’s devices could enable “superhuman cognition” and “solve” autism and schizophrenia. During a “show and tell” recruitment event in late 2022, Musk said he plans to get an implant himself.
The company has implanted its flagship system in one human patient so far and has not received FDA approval for its technology.
LeCun was also critical of how Musk takes credit for the work of others. He pointed out that Musk’s only technical publication on Google Scholar is related to Neuralink. It was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2019. Musk is listed as the lead author, while the blanket term “Neuralink” is listed as the second author.
“I’m sure the scientists who hide behind this collective name are super happy about that,” LeCun said on X. “I just hope they won’t die bitter and forgotten.”
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”