I think he was perhaps right and Meta was perhaps also right to replace him.
replyThe argument is that LLMs are a local maximum that will never breakthrough to AGI. This is still very much an open question. If you are the fifth-best AI lab, does it make sense to try to outcompete everyone in a space that is already too crowded and may not ever yield their actual objective? Instead they could just use open weight models in their products, or post-train on open models like smaller labs have done, and treat that as what it is: product development.
Pure research has always been about taking chances.
I mean, it's an "open question" in the sense that there is no theory behind the idea of AGI, so there's no way to falsify any claim about whether or not any particular path will lead to it.
replyLeCun is a researcher, not a product guy. He's not going to be particularly interested in just working on scaling language models which every lab is already racing to burn cash on. Language models aren't the final frontier of AI.
reply… what large advances and at what cost? seems to me that muse 1.3 is kind of a thing. I doubt it will make meta very much money.
replyAnd? He might still be right.
replyMeta’s AI projects are still negative ROIC