AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic risk a "big bubble explosion" if they don't cut costs or raise prices, AMI Labs founder Yann LeCun told CNBC. Prices for AI services keep climbing, but operating costs aren't dropping fast enough, he said. According to him, all of these companies are losing money, and investors are effectively subsidizing usage. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently called AI costs for businesses a "huge issue" too.

LeCun also called Elon Musk's xAI "a kind of failure," pointing out that the founding team has left the company and Musk can barely recruit top talent anymore. He doesn't expect xAI to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic, he told CNBC. LeCun and Musk have clashed publicly for years, mostly because LeCun rejects Musk's political views.

LeCun's comments aren't entirely selfless. Rather than betting on the large language models that dominate at OpenAI and Anthropic, he's pushing "world models," systems that build an understanding of the real world. His company, AMI Labs, raised a billion dollars for that effort in March. An LLM bubble burst could push more money toward his research, but it could also cool the market as a whole.