I'm still not sure why they keep LeCun at Facebook; his single most-cited contribution to the field in 2024 has been with NYU[0], not Facebook. What is his role at Facebook exactly, has he explained it? I recall him making all the wrong predictions in 2023 what's changed? Chollet is similarly a mystery to me; it feels like these guys were busy riffing CNN's when the Transformer came about and since then have been trying to far-out in search of gold.
I'm also a bit unclear on why LeCun is so well regarded. I've nothing against him, and his opinions shared on Twitter seem eminently sensible, but at the end of the day it seems his main accomplishment (and/or credit assignment) was inventing CNNs back in the 80's and using them for reading handwriting on checks.
Looking back at the PDP handbook, it's not even clear that LeCun deserves the credit for CNNs, and he himself gives credit for the core "weight sharing" idea to Rumelhart.
Chollet's claim to fame seems to be more as creator of Keras than researcher, which has certainly been of great use to a lot of people. He has recently left Google and is striking out to pursue his own neuro-symbolic vision for AGI. Good luck to him - seems like a nice and very smart guy, and it's good to see people pursuing their own approaches outside of the LLM echo chamber.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16860