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

> because the AI's lack axiomatic systems beyond much manually constructed machinery.

Oh god, that is massively under-selling their learning ability. These models are able to extract and reply with why jokes are funny without even knowing basic vocab, yet there are pure-code models out there with lingual rules baked in from day one which still struggle with basic grammar.

The _point_ of LLMs arguably is there ability to learn any pattern thrown at it with enough compute. With an exception to learning how logical processes work, and pure LLMs only see "time" in the sense of a paragraph begins and ends.

At the least they have taught computers, "how to language", which in regards to how to interact with a machine is a _huge_ step forward.

Unfortunately the financial incentives are split between agentic model usage (taking the idea of a computerised butler further), maximizing model memory and raw learning capacity (answering all problems at any time), and long-range consistency (longer ranges give better stable results due to a few reasons, but we're some way from seeing an LLM with a 128k experts and 10e18 active tokens).

I think in terms of building the perfect monkey butler we already have most or all of the parts. With regard to a model which can dynamically learn on the fly... LLMs are not the end of the story and we need something to allow the models to more closely tie their LS with the context. Frankly the fact that DeepSeek gave us an LLM with LS was a huge leap since previous model attempts had been overly complex and had failed in training.

I wonder, what LeCun wants to do is more fundamental research, i.e. where the timeline to being useful is much longer, maybe 5-10 years at least, and also much more uncertain.

How does this fit together with a startup? Would investors happily invest into this knowing not to expect anything in return for at least the next 5-10 years?

Isn't this idea demonstrably false due to the existence of various sensory disorders too?

I have a disorder characterised by the brain failing to filter own its own sensory noise, my vision is full of analogue TV-like distortion and other artefacts. Sometimes when it's bad I can see my brain constructing an image in real time rather than this perception happening instantaneously, particularly when I'm out walking. A deer becomes a bundle of sticks becomes a muddy pile of rocks (what it actually is) for example over the space of seconds. This to me is pretty strong evidence we do not experience reality directly, and instead construct our perceptions predictively from whatever is to hand.

I have no idea why this fair assessment of the status quo is being downvoted.

LeCun hasn't produced anything noteworthy in the past decade.

He uses the same slides in all of his presentations.

LLMs, while not yet AGI, have shown tremendous progress, and are actually useful for 99% of use cases for the average person.

The remaining 1% is for deep research into the deep unknown (physics, chemistry, genetics, diseases, the nature of intelligence itself), an area in which they falter.

Carmack laid the foundation for the all-in-one VR headsets.