Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner, professor at NYU, the man they call the "godfather of AI", left Meta at the end of 2025 to found AMI Labs... and in his interview with Le Figaro in June 2026, he said something that deserves to be lingered on for a long time, because it describes something far deeper than what most people took away from it:
"Foundation models are going to become an infrastructure of the information society."
An infrastructure. Like electricity, like the telephone, like running water. And when I read that, it makes me think of something... when electricity became an infrastructure, what did we do? Well, we created public services, we created regulators, we created guarantees of access... we didn't let a private oligopoly control it and bill it by usage. And yet, that's exactly what we're doing with AI... we're letting three American companies control the information infrastructure of tomorrow, and we pay by usage, per token, per request.
Open source, according to LeCun
And LeCun on open source, he's quite clear, he doesn't mince his words... "OpenAI was never open. Anthropic is very secretive. Google closed up like an oyster. Meta is heading down that path, and it's one of the reasons that made me leave the group." Well there you have it, the godfather of AI leaves the largest social media company in the world because it's closing its code, and he says it publicly, without holding back. That should give us pause.
He now supports the Tapestry project, led by the AI Alliance, an organization promoting open source AI. The idea is to federate efforts all over the world to train a foundation model that would be a repository of all human knowledge, and that would be open, free, sovereign. And when I read that, I tell myself it's exactly what I advocate for with my clients... the model is free, what you pay for is the service, the integration, the support, not the model itself.
AI like the printing press
But the sentence that moved me the most is this one... "AI is a means of disseminating culture and knowledge, much like the printing press enabled the Age of Enlightenment. If we restrict access to AI to a small number, we're putting sticks in our own wheels." The printing press... the Age of Enlightenment. When you think about AI in those terms, the question of open source takes on a dimension that goes far beyond the technical debate, it's almost a question of civilization.
And LeCun adds something that resonates with my daily concerns... he says that if all our information passes through AI assistants, and these assistants come only from a handful of companies on the west coast of the United States or from China, well that will be very dangerous for culture, language, democracy, and the diversity of political opinions. Foundation models are becoming an infrastructure of the information society, and the question of who owns this infrastructure becomes a fundamental political question.
Open source is not a developer ideology... it's the technical condition for the information infrastructure not to be privatized end to end. And if you want to know how this gets set up concretely, with Ollama, on a Mac or a server, well that's exactly what I do with the companies that come to see me.