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Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

entropytown.com

41–50 of 105 posts

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#41

With all due respect, AI is ultimately a capital game. World models aren’t where real B2B customer revenue comes from—at least compared to today’s LLMs; they’re mainly a better story for raising huge amounts of private capital. Hopefully they figure out how to build the next-gen AI architecture along the way.

AI might be the biggest transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor in history. Billions have been poured into closed sourced models which have led directly and indirectly to open weight models being available to everyone.

At the cost of buying the poor's thoughts (training data)

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#43

If I was smarter, I would have predicted that not only would everyone else figure out that world models are a critical step, but that as a direct consequence the term "world model" would lose all meaning. Maybe next time. That said, Le Cunn's concept in the blog post is the only one worthy of the title.

The naming collision here is unfortunate since the two kinds of models described couldn't be any more different in purpose. Maybe JEPA-type world models should explicitly be called "predictive world models".

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#44

If I was smarter, I would have predicted that not only would everyone else figure out that world models are a critical step, but that as a direct consequence the term "world model" would lose all meaning. Maybe next time. That said, Le Cunn's concept in the blog post is the only one worthy of the title.

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The first link is about how philosophy and psychology is used to describe brain-cognitive behavior research, which has a limited explanatory capability compared to a hypothetical interpretation using its own vocabulary instead of those borrowed from other fields.

The second link is about an AI that detects consciousness in coma patients.

The third link is about how coma is associated with a low-complexity and high-predictability passive cortical state. Kickstarting the brain to a high-complexity and low-predictability state of cortical dynamics is a sign of recovery back to consciousness.

How does any of this support what you have said?

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#45
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI might be the biggest transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor in history. Billions have been poured into closed sourced models which have led directly and indirectly to open weight models being available to everyone.

At the cost of buying the poor's thoughts (training data)

Pretty similar to social media in a lot of ways. They've strip mined the commons and provided us a corporate controlled walled garden to compensate us for our loss.

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#47
LLMs are parameter based representations of linguistic representations of the world. Relative to robot predictive control problems, they are low dimensional and static. They are batch trained using supervised learning and are not designed to manage real time shifts in the external world or the reward space. They work because they operate in abstract, rule governed spaces like language and mathematics. They are ill suited to predictive control tasks. They are the IBM 360s of AI. Even so, they are astonishing achievements.

LeCun is right to say that continuous self supervised (hierarchical) learning is the next frontier, and that means we need world models. I'm not sure that JEPA is the right tool to get us past that frontier, but at the moment there are not a lot of alternatives on the table.

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#48

With all due respect, AI is ultimately a capital game. World models aren’t where real B2B customer revenue comes from—at least compared to today’s LLMs; they’re mainly a better story for raising huge amounts of private capital. Hopefully they figure out how to build the next-gen AI architecture along the way.

By capital game, do you mean money investment game or market ruler's game?

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#49

If I was smarter, I would have predicted that not only would everyone else figure out that world models are a critical step, but that as a direct consequence the term "world model" would lose all meaning. Maybe next time. That said, Le Cunn's concept in the blog post is the only one worthy of the title.

[dead]

Does Stevie Wonder not experience the world since he's blind and anosmic?

Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"

#50
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> There is no mind Interesting. What is your response to the cogito?

The canonical 20th-century response to "cogito ergo sum" is Wittgenstein's "private-language argument." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

When you thought to yourself, "I think therefore I am," in what language did you think it? In English? The English language is an artifact of a community of English speakers. You can't have a language with grammatical rules without a community of speakers to make that language.

Almost nobody in the English-speaking community has direct access to the internals of your mind. The community learns things through consensus, e.g. via the scientific method. We know things in English via a community of English-speaking scientists, journalists, historians, etc. etc. Wittgenstein calls these the "structures of life," the ordinary day-to-day work we do to figure out what's true and false, likely and unlikely.

As you're probably aware, the scientific method has long struggled to find a "mind" in the brain doing the thinking; all we can find are just atoms, molecules, neurons, doing things, having behaviors. We can't find "thoughts" in the atoms. As far as our ordinary day-to-day scientific method is concerned, we can't find a "mind."

But "cogito ergo sum" isn't part of the scientific method. We don't believe "cogito ergo sum" because reproducible experiments have shown it to be true. "Cogito ergo sum" proposes a way of knowing disconnected from the messy structures of life we use in English.

So, perhaps you'd say, "oh, good point, I suppose I didn't think 'cogito ergo sum' in English or Latin or whatever, I thought it in a private language known only to me. From this vantage point, I only have direct knowledge of my own existence and my own perceptions in the present moment (since the past is uncertain), but at least I can have 100% certainty of my own existence in that language."

The problem is, you really can't have a private language, not a language with words (terms) and grammatical rules and logical inferences.

Suppose you assigned a term S to a particular sensation you're having right now. What are the rules of S? What is S and what is not S? Are there any rules for how to use S? How would you know? How would you enforce those rules over time? In a private language, there's no difference between using the term S "correctly" or "incorrectly." There are no rules in a private language; there can't be. Even mathematical proofs are impossible when every term in the proof means anything you want.

Descartes didn't originally write "cogito ergo sum" in Latin. He originally published it in French, "je pense, donc je suis." But in Europe, where Descartes was writing, Latin was the universal language, the one known to all sorts of people across the continent. For Descartes, Latin was the language of empire, the language every civilized person knew because their ancestors were forced to learn it at the point of a sword, the language of absolutes.

Wittgenstein has a famous line, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." So must we be silent about "cogito ergo sum." "cogito ergo sum" isn't valid in Latin; "je pense, donc je suis" isn't valid in French. It could only be valid in an unspeakable private language, a language with no grammatical rules, no logic, where true and false are indistinguishable. "Cogito ergo sum" could only be valid in an unusable language where everything is meaningless.

Thereof, we must remain silent.

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