I think LeCun has been so consistently wrong and boneheaded for basically all of the AI boom, that this is much, much more likely to be bad than good for Europe. Probably one of the worst people to give that much money to that can even raise it in the field.

LeCun was stubbornly 'wrong and boneheaded' in the 80s, but turned out to be right. His contention now is that LLMs don't truly understand the physical world - I don't think we know enough yet to say whether he is wrong.

Could you please elaborate on what he was wrong about?

He said that LLMs wouldn't have common sense about how the real world physically works, because it's so obvious to humans that we don't bother putting it into text. This seems pretty foolish honestly given the scale of internet data, and even at the time LLMs could handle the example he said they couldn't

I believe he didn't think that reasoning/CoT would work well or scale like it has