Corporate R&D teams are there to absorb risk, innovate, disrupt, create new fields, not for doing small incremental improvements. "If we know it works, it's not research." (Albert Einstein)
I also agree with LeCun that LLMs in their current form - are a dead end. Note that this does not mean that I think we have already exploited LLMs to the limit, we are still at the beginning. We also need to create an ecosystem in which they can operate well: for instance, to combine LLMs with Web agents better we need a scalable "C2B2C" (customer delegated to business to business) micropayment infrastructure, because as these systems have already begun talking to each other, in the longer run nobody would offer their APIs for free.
I work on spatial/geographic models, inter alia, which by coincident is one of the direction mentioned in the LeCun article. I do not know what his reasoning is, but mine was/is: LMs are language models, and should (only) be used as such. We need other models - in particular a knowledge model (KM/KB) to cleanly separate knowledge from text generation - it looks to me right now that only that will solve hallucination.
Well then you and he are clearly dead wrong.
Talking to these people is exhausting, so I cut straight to the chase: name the exact, unavoidable conditions that would prove AGI won’t happen.
Shockingly, nobody has an answer. They’ve never even considered it.
That’s because their whole belief is unfalsifiable.