I think you misunderstand what he thinks LLMs can and can't do. He says repeatedly that LLMs may be great for generating text and code, but that a fundamental model of artificial intelligence should be able to perceive and use information outside of text. Also, that a supervised learning approach is not exactly representative for how we learn. That it's a small piece but we largely learn with unsupervised learning. His main criticisms of LLMs are that they are supervised, probabilistic, and learn largely from text instead of observations. His claims about performance come downstream and I'd still argue that he's been (somewhat) right about those as well.

That LLMs don't have common sense and don't have good physical reasoning abilities; that you can't scale LLMs all the way to AGI; or that they can't predict the consequences of their actions which is the foundation of agentic behavior all seem like still (mostly) accurate predictions to me.

While LeCun has his share of problems, I think largely his criticisms on LLMs are more right than wrong. What remains to see is how good JEPA can be at filling in the gaps left behind from the brittleness of LLMS.

All of us were shocked with RL on LLMs.

To me LLMs have gotten better since 2024, but their fundamental flaws still seem there.

They hallucinate when it comes to really challenging tasks such as math proofs. They still do not reuse code well and will rewrite functions instead of perusing the standard library.

But this is good news. LLMs are awesome and they are only the first step towards AI being applied everywhere. They are a Model T