"These models aim to replicate human reasoning and understanding of the physical world, a project LeCun has said could take a decade to mature." What an insane time horizon to define success. I suppose he easily can raise enough capital for that kind of runway.
Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
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Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#32Change my mind, Facebook was never invented by Zuck's genius All he's been responsible for is making it worse
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#33Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#34Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#35Change my mind, Facebook was never invented by Zuck's genius All he's been responsible for is making it worse
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
LeCun always said that LLMs do not lead to AGI.
Can anyone explain to me the non-$$ logic for one working towards AGI, aside from misanthropy? The only other thing I can imagine is not very charitable: intellectual greed. It can't just be that, can it? I genuinely don't understand. I would love to be educated.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is also not very interested in LLMs, and that seems to be Zuck's top priority.
Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.
If you want to predict future text, you use an LLM. If you want to predict future frames in a video, you go with Diffusion. But what both of them lack is object permanence. If a car isn't visible in the input frame, it won't be visible in the output. But in the real world, there are A LOT of things that are invisible (image) or not mentioned but only implied (text) that still strongly affect the future. Every kid knows that when you roll a marble behind your hand, it'll come out on the other side. But LLMs and Diffusion models routinely fail to predict that, as for them the object disappears when it stops being visible.
Based on what I heard from others, world models are considered the missing ingredient for useful robots and self-driving cars. If that's halfway accurate, it would make sense to pour A LOT of money into world models, because they will unlock high-value products.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is also not very interested in LLMs, and that seems to be Zuck's top priority.
Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.
Corporate R&D teams are there to absorb risk, innovate, disrupt, create new fields, not for doing small incremental improvements. "If we know it works, it's not research." (Albert Einstein)
I also agree with LeCun that LLMs in their current form - are a dead end. Note that this does not mean that I think we have already exploited LLMs to the limit, we are still at the beginning. We also need to create an ecosystem in which they can operate well: for instance, to combine LLMs with Web agents better we need a scalable "C2B2C" (customer delegated to business to business) micropayment infrastructure, because as these systems have already begun talking to each other, in the longer run nobody would offer their APIs for free.
I work on spatial/geographic models, inter alia, which by coincident is one of the direction mentioned in the LeCun article. I do not know what his reasoning is, but mine was/is: LMs are language models, and should (only) be used as such. We need other models - in particular a knowledge model (KM/KB) to cleanly separate knowledge from text generation - it looks to me right now that only that will solve hallucination.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#39But wait they're just about to get AGI why would he leave???
LeCun always said that LLMs do not lead to AGI.
Previously, he very publicly and strongly said:
a) LLMs can't do math. They trick us in poetry but that's subjective. They can't do objective math.
b) they can't plan
c) by the very nature of autoregressive arch, errors compound. So the longer you go in your generation, the higher the error rate. so at long contexts the answers become utter garbage.
All of these were proven wrong, 1-2 years later. "a" at the core (gold at IMO), "b" w/ software glue and "c" with better training regimes.
I'm not interested in the will it won't it debates about AGI, I'm happy with what we have now, and I think these things are good enough now, for several usecases. But it's important to note when people making strong claims get them wrong. Again, I think I get where he's coming from, but the public stances aren't the place to get into the deep research minutia.
That being said, I hope he gets to find whatever it is that he's looking for, and wish him success in his endeavours. Between him, Fei Fei Li and Ilya, something cool has to come out of the small shops. Heck, I'm even rooting for the "let's commoditise lora training" that Mira's startup seems to go for.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That guy has survived the AI winter. He can wait 10 years for yet another breakthrough. [but the market can’t] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
We're at most in an "AI Autumn" right now. The real Winter is yet to come.