Elon Musk mocked by Meta AI chief Yann LeCun over xAI recruiting drive

• Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun mocked Elon Musk on X over his xAI recruitment drive.
• The spat follows xAI announcing it had raised $6 billion in Series B funding.
• LeCun criticized Musk’s AI predictions and claims of free speech absolutism.

Elon Musk is getting dragged by Meta’s AI chief on his own platform.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s leading AI scientist, poked fun at Musk on X on Monday over his attempt to recruit AI workers for his $24 billion firm xAI.

The pair have been embroiled in a fresh spat since Musk’s xAI announced Sunday that it had raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round.

On Monday, Musk posted a call to tech workers to join his company: “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.”

LeCun, who has publicly feuded with Musk in the past, was quick to respond to Musk’s post.

He wrote: “Join xAI if you can stand a boss who: – claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure). – claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!). – claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”

LeCun was referring to Musk’s claim in April that artificial general intelligence will arrive by next year, a prediction that he doubled down on last week, as well as his estimate of there being a 10-20% chance that AI could destroy humanity.

The “godfather of AI” also took a jab at Musk’s claims of being a free-speech absolutist and for sharing unverified claims on X.

The platform took down a post that Musk re-shared in March because it violated X’s own rules.

The tech rivals have quarreled online since at least 2017 and often don’t see eye-to-eye. LeCun snapped at Musk in March, and disputed his claim that AI “will probably be smarter than any single human next year.”

xAI’s sole product so far is a chatbot called Grok, which was trained using data from Twitter, now called X, including Musk’s posts.

Elon Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.