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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'

#131
post #55
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I politely disagree - it is exactly an industry researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work, simply because the rest of the corporation cannot take such risks but must walk on more well-trodden paths. 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 agre…

Knowledge models, like ontologies, always seem suspect to me; like they promise a schema for crisp binary facts, when the world is full of probabilistic and fuzzy information loosely categorized by fallible humans based on an ever slowly shifting social consensus. Everything from the sorites paradox to leaky abstractions; everything real defies precise definition when you look closely at it, and when you try to abstr…

You're basically describing the knowledge problem vs model structure, how to even begin to design a system which self-updates/dynamically-learns vs being trained and deployed.

Cracking that is a huge step, pure multi-modal trained models will probably give us a hint, but I think we're some ways from seeing a pure multi-modal open model which can be pulled apart/modified. Even then they're still train and deploy not dynamically learning. I worry we're just going to see LSTM design bolted onto deep LLM because we don't know where else to go and it will be fragile and take eons to train.

And less said about the crap of "but inference is doing some kind of minimization within the context window" the better, it's vacuous and not where great minds should be looking for a step forwards.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#132
post #48
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I politely disagree - it is exactly an industry researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work, simply because the rest of the corporation cannot take such risks but must walk on more well-trodden paths. 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 agre…

> it is exactly a researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work Maybe at university, but not at a trillion dollar company. That job as chief scientist is leading risky things that will work to please the shareholders.

What exactly does it mean for something to be a "risky thing that will work"?

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The Chinese are very capable. Most DL papers have at least one Chinese name on it. That doesn't mean they are Chinese but it's telling.

is an american model chinese because chinese people were in the team?

There is no need for that tone here.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They knew what Yann LeCun was when they hired him. If anything, those brilliant academics who have done what they're told and loyally pursued corporate objectives the way the corporation wanted (e.g. Karpathy when he was at Tesla) haven't had great success either.

>They knew what Yann LeCun was when they hired him. Yes but he was hired in the ZIRP era where all SV companies were hiring every opinionated academic and giving them free reign and unlimited money to burn in the hopes that maybe they'll create the next big thing for them eventually. These are very different economic times right now, after the FED infinite money glitch has been patched out, so now people do need to a…

so your message is to short OpenAI before it implodes and gets absorbed into Cortana or equivalent ;)

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was obviously him getting sidelined. And it's easy to see why. LLMs get results. None of the Yann LeCun's pet projects do. He had ample time to prove that his approach is promising, and he didn't.

LLMs get results is quite the bold statement. If they get results, they should be getting adopted, and they should be making money. This is all built on hazy promises. If you had marketable results, you wouldn't have to hide 20+ billion dollars of debt financing into an obscure SPV. LLMs are the most baffling piece of tech. They are incredible, and yet marred by their non-deterministic hallucinatory nature, and bound…

OpenAI and Anthropic are making north of 4B/year revenue so some companies have figured out the money making part. ChatGPT has some 800M users according to some calculations. Whether it's enough money today, enough money tomorrow, is of course a question but there is a lot of money. Users would not use them in a scale if they do not solve their problems.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#136
post #6

Making LeCun report to Wang was the most boneheaded move imaginable. But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.

He is also not very interested in LLMs, and that seems to be Zuck's top priority.

The role of basic research is to get off the beaten path.

LLMs aren’t basic research when they have 1 billion users

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was obviously him getting sidelined. And it's easy to see why. LLMs get results. None of the Yann LeCun's pet projects do. He had ample time to prove that his approach is promising, and he didn't.

There is someone else at Facebook who's pet projects do not get results...

Sure, but that "someone else" is the man writing the checks. If the roles were reversed, he'd be the one being fired now.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Still true: vanilla LLMs can’t do math, they pattern-match unless you bolt on tools. b) Still true: next-token prediction isn’t planning. c) Still true: error accumulation is mitigated, not eliminated. Long-context quality still relies on retrieval, checks, and verifiers. Yann’s claims were about LLMs as LLMs. With tooling, you can work around limits, but the core point stands.

a) no, gemini 2.5 was shown to "win" gold w/o tools. - https://arxiv.org/html/2507.15855v1 b) reductionism isn't worth our time. Planning works in the real world, today. (try any agentic tool like cc/codex/whatever). And if you're set on the purist view, there's mounting evidence from anthropic that there is planning in the core of an LLM. c) so ... not true? Long context works today. This is simply moving goalposts…

a) That "no-tools" win depends on prompt orchestration which can still be categorized as tooling.

b) Next-token training doesn’t magically grant inner long-horizon planners..

c) Long context ≠ robust at any length. Degradation with scale remains.

Not moving goalposts, just keeping terms precise.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#140
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs and Diffusion solve a completely different problem than world models. 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 b…

lol what is this? We already have world models based on diffusion and ar algorithms.
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