This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition.
Could you elaborate on the connections between image recognition / interpretation and prediction? For this reply, it's fine to be only roughly accurate. (In case an inability to be sufficiently rigorous is what prevented you from sketching the connection.)
...naively, I think of intelligence as, say, an ability to identify and solve problems. Is LeCun saying perhaps that this is equal to prediction, or not as important as prediction, or that he's more interested in working on the latter?
Yann LeCun, now of Facebook, was interviewed by The Register. It is interesting that his view of AI is apparently that of a prediction tool:
"In some ways you could say intelligence is all about prediction," he explained. "What you can identify in intelligence is it can predict what is going to happen in the world with more accuracy and more time horizon than others."
rather than of a world optimizer. This is not very surprising, given his background in handwriting and image recognition. This "AI as intelligence augmentation" view appears to be prevalent among the AI researchers in general.