AI 'Godfather' predicts a technological revolution will explode in the next 5 years

Yann LeCun, lead AI scientist at Meta, under Mark Zuckerberg, stressed that new technological breakthroughs are a prerequisite for AI systems to truly understand and interact effectively with the physical world.

He was one of seven scientists honored to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize (QEPrize) worth £500,000 on February 4, recognizing their outstanding contributions in the field of machine learning technology, the core foundation of AI.

Recent breakthroughs in this field, particularly the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, have fueled both hope and concern that AI systems are getting closer than ever to human-level intelligence.

However, LeCun believes that AI still has a long way to go before it can be on par with humans or even animals. He emphasizes that while current technology can process language excellently, it still does not truly understand the physical world.

“There are still a lot of scientific and technological challenges ahead, and it is very likely that in the next three to five years we will see another AI revolution due to the limitations of current systems,” he said. “If we really want to create smart home robots or fully autonomous cars, AI needs to be able to understand and interact with the real world.”

LeCun is working on AI systems that can “understand” physical reality by building predictive models of how the world works. “We’re still very far from human-level intelligence,” he says of current AI progress. “If we can develop a system that’s as intelligent as a cat or a mouse, that would be a huge breakthrough.”

But Yoshua Bengio, LeCun’s co-recipient of the QEPrize, warned that more progress is needed to ensure the safety of the technology, and called for next week’s global AI summit in Paris to focus on addressing these challenges.

“I want world leaders to be more aware of the scale of what we are creating, a power that can bring enormous benefits but also poses significant dangers, along with risks that cannot be ignored,” he stressed.

In 2018, Bengio and LeCun, along with Geoffrey Hinton, were honored with the Turing Award, considered the “Nobel Prize of computing,” for their pioneering contributions to AI. On February 4, Hinton was honored as one of the winners of the QEPrize.

The award comes as AI pioneers have achieved some glorious milestones in the past year, with two Nobel Prizes going to scientists in the field.

Notably, Hinton shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield, an American physicist also honored at this year's QEPrize, while researchers at Google DeepMind were among the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Machine learning is at the core of AI development. Instead of being programmed with specific instructions, computers can “learn” for themselves by analyzing data and making intelligent decisions or predictions, such as determining the next word in a sentence.

Other notable individuals honored at the QEPrize 2025 Prize include: Fei-Fei Li, a Chinese-American computer scientist who developed ImageNet, a groundbreaking dataset that helps train AI to recognize objects; Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, a leading chipmaker that plays a key role in operating and training AI; and Bill Dally, Nvidia's chief scientist.

Patrick Vallance, chairman of the QEPrize Foundation, stressed that the impact of machine learning is widespread across industries, economies, and the globe. He said the prestigious award honors engineers whose innovations have “profound impacts on billions of people around the world.”