Also in fairness to LeCun, that sentence started with “in terms of underlying techniques”, and his words reported in the media are guaranteed to be a subset of

Also in fairness to LeCun, that sentence started with “in terms of underlying techniques”, and his words reported in the media are guaranteed to be a subset of what he said. A journalist talked to him, found an angle, and quoted to support that angle. What comes across is someone who downplays both the effort involved with and the importance of the “boring” stuff, the tweaks and product design that tie everything together, but we actually don’t know that he thinks like that. We just know that he said some things that can be excerpted to sound that way.