Yann LeCun warns AI bubble as compute costs surge

AI pioneer Yann LeCun told CNBC that Elon Musk’s xAI is "a kind of failure" because its founding team has left and it cannot compete with OpenAI or Anthropic. He warned that the industry’s high operating costs could trigger an AI bubble burst, noting that even large firms such as SpaceX’s AI unit lost $2.5 billion in a quarter and Anthropic spends $12.5 billion‑plus each month on compute.

LeCun’s concerns echo a broader industry‑wide crunch. Chinese AI companies report severe token and compute shortages, forcing limit‑purchase policies and price hikes for high‑end models from Zhipu, Kimi and MiniMax. Cloud providers such as Tencent and Alibaba are raising prices, while efforts to shift to domestic chips face performance gaps. The combined pressure of rising token costs and scarce compute capacity is seen as a key risk to revenue growth and could precipitate a market correction across the global AI sector.