Yann LeCun was programing neural networks before before most of the people who replied in this thread was even born, he made optical character recognition work on hardware that makes your smartfridge looks like a supercomputer. He doesn't say this from a sore loser point of view but to understand where he come from you need to look at what he's actually saying.

He didn't say chatGPT sucks.

He didn't say meta have something better.

He said it's "not particularly innovative". Which is true.

• Transformers models have been around since 2017.
• Language models are more numerous than anyone can keep track of.
• Dialogue oriented fine tuning have been made before.
• Virtually all names in big tech are training large language models.

Why is chatGPT doing so well then?

• It's a big model, which is hardly new, but it's accessible and usable for free.
• openAI have a good media traction, so they make a splash even when they show off closed models.

So when LeCun says it's "not particularly innovative", is he really wrong? Is being a known name and giving out free stuff^((arguably they are datamining the public for additional training data, which makes the free part a little bit less free)) considered innovative?