I really hope he returns to Europe for his new startup.
Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
161–170 of 680 posts
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#162Earlier 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.
>the huge impact they're already having In the software development world yes, outside of that, virtually none. Yes, you can transcribe a video call in Office, yes, but that's not ground breaking. I dare you to list 10 impacts on different fields, excluding tech and including at least half blue collar fields and at least half white collar fields , at different levels from the lowest to the highest in the company hier…
I'm also not sure it even drives a ton of value in software engineering. It makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder. Typing out software in your mind was never the difficult part. Figuring out what to write, how to interpret specs in context, how to make your code work within the context of a broader whole, how to be extensible, maintainable, reliable, etc. That's hard, and LLMs really don't help.
Even when writing, it shifts the mental burden from an easy thing (writing code) to a very hard thing (reading that code, validating it's right, hallucination free, and then refactoring it to match your teams code style and patterns).
It's great for building a first-order approximation of a tech demo app that you then throw out and build from scratch, and auto-complete. In my experience, anyways. I'm sure others have had different experiences.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#163This seems like a good thing for him to get to fully pursue his own ideas independent of Meta. Large incumbents aren’t usually the place for innovating anything far from mainstream considering the risk and cost of failure. The high level idea of JEPA is sound, but it takes a lot of work to get it trained well at scale before it has value to Meta.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#164Making 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.
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Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does Meta even want with AI? I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero. Which is…
At 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused b…
You missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example.
Would be very inline with the AI angle.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#166From the outside, it always looked like they gave LeCun just barely enough compute for small scale experiments. They'd publish a promising new paper, show it works at a small scale, then not use it at all for any of their large AI runs.
I would have loved to see a VLM utilizing JEPA for example, but it simply never happened.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#167Making 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.
In industry research, someone in a chief position like LeCun should know how to balance long-term research with short-term projects. However, for whatever reason, he consistently shows hostility toward LLMs and engineering projects, even though Llama and PyTorch are two of the most influential projects from Meta AI. His attitude doesn’t really match what is expected from a Chief position at a product company like Fac…
These are the types that want academic freedom in a cut-throat industry setup and conversely never fit into academia because their profiles and growth ambitions far exceed what an academic research lab can afford (barring some marquee names). It's an unfortunate paradox.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#168Earlier 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.
R&D can be automated to speed up medical research - saving lives, prolonging life, etc.
Assistant robots for the elderly. In many countries population is shrinking, so fundamentally just not enough people to take care of the old.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He im…
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…
Pleased to meet someone else who suffers from "visual snow". I'm fortunate in that like my tinnitus, I'm only acutely aware of it when I'm reminded of it, or, less frequently, when it's more pronounced.
You're quite correct that our "reality" is in part constructed. The Flashed Face Distortion Effect [0][1] (wherein faces in the peripheral vision appear distorted due the the brain filling in the missing information with what was there previously) is just one example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effect [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37991-9
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also said other things about LLMs that turned out to be either wrong or easily bypassed with some glue. While I understand where he comes from, and that his stance is pure research-y theory driven, at the end of the day his positions were wrong. 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) b…
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.
My man, math is pattern matching, not magic. So is logic. And computation.
Please learn the basics before you discuss what LLMs can and can't do.