I don’t think it’s a good idea to engage with criticism of an idea in the form of meme videos from Reddit designed to dunk on the critic. Is that intellectually healthy?
I don’t think the person who made that video or other people who want to dunk on Yann LeCun for that quote understand what he was trying to say. (Benjamin Todd recently made the same mistake here.) I think people are interpreting this quote hyper-literally and missing the broader point LeCun was trying to make.
Even today, in April 2025, models like GPT-4o and o3-mini don’t have a robust understanding of things like time, causality, and the physics of everyday objects. They will routinely tell you absurd things like that an event that happened in 2024 was caused by an event in 2025, while listing the dates of the events. Why don’t LLMs, still, in April 2025 consistently understand that causes precede effects and not vice versa?
If anything, this makes it seem like what LeCun said in January 2022 seem prescient. Despite a tremendous amount of scaling of training data and training compute, and, more recently, significant scaling of test-time compute, the same fundamental flaw LeCun called out over 3 years ago remains a flaw in the latest LLMs.
All that being said… I think even if LeCun had made the claim that I think people are mistakenly interpreting him as making and he had turned out to have been wrong about that, discrediting him based on him being wrong about that one thing would be ridiculously uncharitable.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to engage with criticism of an idea in the form of meme videos from Reddit designed to dunk on the critic. Is that intellectually healthy?
I don’t think the person who made that video or other people who want to dunk on Yann LeCun for that quote understand what he was trying to say. (Benjamin Todd recently made the same mistake here.) I think people are interpreting this quote hyper-literally and missing the broader point LeCun was trying to make.
Even today, in April 2025, models like GPT-4o and o3-mini don’t have a robust understanding of things like time, causality, and the physics of everyday objects. They will routinely tell you absurd things like that an event that happened in 2024 was caused by an event in 2025, while listing the dates of the events. Why don’t LLMs, still, in April 2025 consistently understand that causes precede effects and not vice versa?
If anything, this makes it seem like what LeCun said in January 2022 seem prescient. Despite a tremendous amount of scaling of training data and training compute, and, more recently, significant scaling of test-time compute, the same fundamental flaw LeCun called out over 3 years ago remains a flaw in the latest LLMs.
All that being said… I think even if LeCun had made the claim that I think people are mistakenly interpreting him as making and he had turned out to have been wrong about that, discrediting him based on him being wrong about that one thing would be ridiculously uncharitable.