I don’t understand your view. Reality is that we need some way to encode the rules of the world in a more definitive way. If we want models to be able to make assertive claims about important information and be correct, it’s very fair to theorize they might need a more deterministic approach than just training them more. But it’s just a theory that this will actually solve the problem.
Ultimately, we still have a lot to learn and a lot of experiments to do. It’s frankly unscientific to suggest any approaches are off the table, unless the data & research truly proves that. Why shouldn’t we take this awesome LLM technology and bring in more techniques to make it better?
A really, really basic example is chess. Current top AI models still don’t know how to play it (https://www.software7.com/blog/ai_chess_vs_1983_atari/) The models are surely trained on source material that include chess rules, and even high level chess games. But the models are not learning how to play chess correctly. They don’t have a model to understand how chess actually works — they only have a non-deterministic prediction based on what they’ve seen, even after being trained on more data than any chess novice has ever seen about the topic. And this is probably one of the easiest things for AI to stimulate. Very clear/brief rules, small problem space, no hidden information, but it can’t handle the massive decision space because its prediction isn’t based on the actual rules, but just “things that look similar”
(And yeah, I’m sure someone could build a specific LLM or agent system that can handle chess, but the point is that the powerful general purpose models can’t do it out of the box after training.)
Maybe more training & self-learning can solve this, but it’s clearly still unsolved. So we should definitely be experimenting with more techniques.
> Reality is that we need some way to encode the rules of the world in a more definitive way
I mean, sure. But do world models the way LeCun proposes them solves this? I don't think so. JEPAs are just an unsupervised machine learning model at the end of the day; they might end up being better that just autoregressive pretraining on text+images+video, but they are not magic. For example, if you train a JEPA model on data of orbital mechanics, will it learn actually sensible algorithms to predict the planets' motions or will it just learn a mix of heuristic?