Yeah sure, learning the internals of a technology that’s being actively developed will probably teach you things that remain useful for awhile even if your learning outcomes could end up being different than what he’s implying.

Whether that makes a good long-term investment is quite debatable. IMO, LeCun’s take (at the end) is far more forward-looking since it aims to gain more insight into what could come next based on what we know about the current state of the art.

All that being said, the extent to which these people capitalize on our tendency to be blinded by the halo effect is incredible. A constant stream of bite-sized aphorisms…

This is especially at a different level for early startup figures who happened to be in the right place at the right time and usually did little more than digitizing mundane, traditional day-to-day processes. Yet they’re treated as geniuses and prophets, with people hanging on their every word as though everything they say contains some deeper wisdom. PG and the like often strike me as broken clocks and they’re still profiting from having been very early players in the game, who had good instincts for commercialization and capitalism.

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LeCun’s reply:

> I would try to figure out why LLMs can write my essays but not clean my bedroom. Then I would study topics in college and grad school that could help solve that problem. I'll figure out a set of methods and architectures beyond LLMs that can quickly learn to perform physical tasks as efficiently as humans and animals. That last item is also what I would if I were 30, 40, 50, or 66 years old