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Yann LeCun, Pioneer of AI, Thinks Today's LLM's Are Nearly Obsolete

(www.newsweek.com)
124 points alphadelphi | 4 comments | 02 Apr 25 22:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.828s | source
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antirez ◴[05 Apr 25 16:31 UTC] No.43594641[source]▶
As LLMs do things thought to be impossible before, LeCun adjusts his statements about LLMs, but at the same time his credibility goes lower and lower. He started saying that LLMs were just predicting words using a probabilistic model, like a better Markov Chain, basically. It was already pretty clear that this was not the case as even GPT3 could do summarization well enough, and there is no probabilistic link between the words of a text and the gist of the content, still he was saying that at the time of GPT3.5 I believe. Then he adjusted this vision when talking with Hinton publicly, saying "I don't deny there is more than just probabilistic thing...". He started saying: not longer just simply probabilistic but they can only regurgitate things they saw in the training set, often explicitly telling people that novel questions could NEVER solved by LLMs, with examples of prompts failing at the time he was saying that and so forth. Now reasoning models can solve problems they never saw, and o3 did huge progresses on ARC, so he adjusted again: for AGI we will need more. And so forth.

So at this point it does not matter what you believe about LLMs: in general, to trust LeCun words is not a good idea. Add to this that LeCun is directing an AI lab that as the same point has the following huge issues:

1. Weakest ever LLM among the big labs with similar resources (and smaller resources: DeepSeek).

2. They say they are focusing on open source models, but the license is among the less open than the available open weight models.

3. LLMs and in general all the new AI wave puts CNNs, a field where LeCun worked (but that didn't started himself) a lot more in perspective, and now it's just a chapter in a book that is composed mostly of other techniques.

Btw, other researchers that were in the LeCun side, changed side recently, saying that now "is different" because of CoT, that is the symbolic reasoning they were blabling before. But CoT is stil regressive next token without any architectural change, so, no, they were wrong, too.

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gcr ◴[05 Apr 25 16:35 UTC] No.43594669[source]▶
Why is changing one’s mind when confronted with new evidence a negative signifier of reputation for you?
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1. bko ◴[05 Apr 25 16:53 UTC] No.43594815[source]▶
Because he has a core belief and based on that core belief he made some statements that turned out to be incorrect. But he kept the core belief and adjusted the statements.

So it's not so much about his incorrect predictions, but that these predictions were based on a core belief. And when the predictions turned out to be false, he didn't adjust his core beliefs, but just his predictions.

So it's natural to ask, if none of the predictions you derived from your core belief come true, maybe your core belief isn't true.

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2. mdp2021 ◴[05 Apr 25 18:34 UTC] No.43595590[source]▶
I have not followed all of LeCun's past statements, but -

if the "core belief" is that the LLM architecture cannot be the way to AGI, that is more of an "educated bet", which does not get falsified when LLMs improve but still suggest their initial faults. If seeing that LLMs seem constrained in the "reactive system" as opposed to a sought "deliberative system" (or others would say "intuitive" vs "procedural" etc.) was an implicit part of the original "core belief", then it still stands in spite of other improvements.

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3. bko ◴[05 Apr 25 18:58 UTC] No.43595900[source]▶
If you say LLMs are a dead end, and you give a few examples of things they will never be able to do, and a few months later they do it, and you just respond by stating that sure they can do that but they're still a dead end and won't be able to do this.

Rinse and repeat.

After a while you question whether LLMs are actually a dead end

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4. mdp2021 ◴[05 Apr 25 19:19 UTC] No.43596084{3}[source]▶
This is a normal routine topical in Epistemology in the perspective of Lakatos.

As I said, it will depend on whether the examples in question were actually substantial part of the "core belief".

For example: "But can they perform procedures?" // "Look at that now" // "But can they do it structurally? Consistently? Reliably?" // "Look at that now" // "But is that reasoning integrated or external?" // "Look at that now" // "But is their reasoning fully procedurally vetted?" (etc.)

I.e.: is the "progress" (which would be the "anomaly" in scientific prediction) part of the "substance" or part of the "form"?