Yann Le Cun does not believe in the end of work, but in France AI is already slowing down the hiring of young people

Work is not going to disappear with AI: the French researcher brushes aside the prophecies of mass unemployment coming from Silicon Valley. French data tells a more nuanced story, where young people pay the bill first.

In a long interview given to Le Point alongside economist Andrew McAfee, Yann Le Cun believes that “only a small proportion of tasks can be automated today”. The French pioneer of deep learning expects to see the emergence of new professions rather than a wave of unemployment. His position contrasts with the darkest predictions of AI laboratories, those of Dario Amodei in the lead.

The boss of Anthropic considers possible the disappearance of half of junior positions in tech, law, consulting and finance within one to five years. Unemployment would then rise to 20%. Yann Le Cun had described this scenario as “ridiculously stupid” in the spring, and the interview confirms that he will not budge.

The prophecies of the end of work carry a heavy burden: John Maynard Keynes announced in 1930 a fifteen-hour week for his grandchildren, by 2030. Co-author of reference work on the digitalization of the economy, Andrew McAfee defends the same line as the French researcher.

Yann Le Cun, still based in New York where he teaches, chose Paris for the headquarters of AMI Labs, the start-up founded after his departure from Meta. It relies on so-called world models, a different path from the major language models which dominate the market and whose limits it has publicly contested for years.

In October, the Banque de France and HEC published a first overview of the French labor market in the era of generative AI. In the most exposed professions, hiring of 21-29 year olds on permanent contracts fell by 28% compared to November 2022, the month of ChatGPT's release. This represents around 75,000 fewer contracts each year. Among young developers and engineers, the drop even reaches around 42%. However, the authors are careful not to establish a direct causal link with AI.

For its part, INSEE measures a decline of 7.4% over one year in employment of 15-29 year olds, excluding work-study programs, in IT in the fourth quarter of 2025, without being able to attribute it to artificial intelligence alone. The phenomenon goes beyond France. As early as August, Stanford researchers measured that among 22-25 year-old Americans in the most exposed professions, employment was 19% lower than that of their peers. The gap was 13% a year earlier. On a market scale, on the other hand, no massive destruction of jobs appears.

These figures do not directly contradict Yann Le Cun: the overall volume of jobs is holding up, and nothing indicates a shift towards mass unemployment. They draw a blind spot in the debate, the gateway to the job market, which is closing for young people even as the total workforce resists.

For a young French graduate, the scenario of mass unemployment remains a hypothesis, when the tightening of recruitment is already measured today in contracts. The end of the job will wait, but for some, the first hire is already waiting.

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Machine-translated from French