In "From Words to Worlds: Spatial Intelligence is AI’s Next Frontier" Li states directly "I’m not a philosopher", proceeds to make a philosophical argument that elevates visual perception as basis for evolution of intelligence.
Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
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Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#52I'm sure there are other valid reasons, but I think the most obvious one is that LLMs are not improving as fast as money asks for so we're moving to the next buzzword.
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#53With 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?
I mean both, and in AI today, they’re deeply intertwined. The “capital game” isn’t just about money—it’s about access to compute, talent, and time. Whoever has the resources can experiment, iterate, and potentially uncover the next big architecture. That financial power naturally translates into influence—control over the market, narrative, and ecosystem. In practice, the investment game and the market ruler’s game often become the same thing.
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#54If 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]
> There is no mind
Thank you for sharing with us your deeply held beliefs
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#55I think there is a lot of merit to this approach. Ultimately we live in a world guided by physics and macro-level perception driven by our senses and our own motor control. Of course newtonian physics is not the end all be all -- cell biology or quantum mechanics works on a very different level... but what is important here is that we know that human beings understand these things and make novel discoveries on these things using a thinking apparatus that was pre-trained on large scale newtonian physics. I've always found that even in advanced mathematics my mind always uses low level geometric analogies. So the "embeddings" or priors that can be obtained are probably much better than what can be done through text correlation as with LLMs. It's very different to learn the word bounce through observation of a physical model of a ball bouncing vs. seeing what other words it co-occurs with.
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#56Earlier 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)
they were always free. The notion of intellectual property is lofty in the first place
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#57Earlier 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.
Open weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people.
They do everything the closed weight models do, slightly less effectively, but for way cheaper. I'd buy that for a dollar!
Just because people aren't spending money on them doesn't mean it won't eat your lunch.
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#58The LLM grift is burned up, so this is the next thing. It has just enough new magic tricks to wow the VCs who don't really get what's going on here. I think this comment from the article says it all: “Taking images and turning them into 3D environments using gaussian splats, depth and inpainting. Cool, but that’s a 3D GS pipeline, not a robot brain.”
One problem with VR and VFX is how expensive it is in terms of man hours to create immersive worlds. This significantly reduces the cost and has applications in all sorts of ways and could realistically improve the availability of content in VR and reduce movie production costs. And that’s just the obvious applications (ignoring that these world models can be used to train AI itself)
who wants to spend time consuming AI art? If the costs are low, then there is no moat to create movies or gaussian splat VR games, and therefore no reason to spend money on movies or VR splat games.
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#59LLMs 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 su…
See, I don't get why people say that the world is somehow more complex than the world of mathematics. I think that is because people don't really understand what mathematics is. A computer game for example is pure mathematics, minus the players, but the players can also be modelled just by their observed digital inputs / outputs.
So the world of mathematics is really the only world model we need. If we can build a self-supervised entity for that world, we can also deal with the real world.
Now, you may have an argument by saying that the "real" world is simpler and more constrained than the mathematical world, and therefore if we focus on what we can do in the real world, we might make progress quicker. That argument I might buy.
Re: Why Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are both betting on "world models"
#60I think there is a lot of merit to this approach. Ultimately we live in a world guided by physics and macro-level perception driven by our senses and our own motor control. Of course newtonian physics is not the end all be all -- cell biology or quantum mechanics works on a very different level... but what is important here is that we know that human beings understand these things and make novel discoveries on these…
The last line is so true! Extremely excited to see where this research in world models takes us to!