India, Feb. 19 -- Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms and Turing Award winner, said long-term AI innovation will increasingly emerge from India and Africa, driven by demographics and young talent pools.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, LeCun said human-level AI could arrive within the lifetimes of younger generations, but progress will be gradual rather than sudden. There will be no dramatic tipping point, he argued. Instead, AI will function primarily as an amplifier of human intelligence, not a replacement.

LeCun described large language models as advanced information retrieval systems, placing them in a historical continuum from the printing press to search engines. While they perform well in cod...