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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"

#91

Post by beeflet »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #81
beeflet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The closed weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people, who find a 20 dollar subscription a bit pricey.

It's not just the cost, but the freedom to do what you want... With open weight models I can run them on my own hardware on the edge, work with data I am not cool with uploading, experiment with different interfaces, use them for things the original trainers did not intend, even retrain the model a bit.

I am developing a p2p program where the model runs on the end user's computer. So I don't even need to pay money for each user and have a bunch of infrastructure monetize them. It is a game changer and allows for a completely different architecture.

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

#92

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

beeflet wrote: post #91
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closed weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people, who find a 20 dollar subscription a bit pricey.

It's not just the cost, but the freedom to do what you want... With open weight models I can run them on my own hardware on the edge, work with data I am not cool with uploading, experiment with different interfaces, use them for things the original trainers did not intend, even retrain the model a bit. I am developing a p2p program where the model runs on the end user's computer. So I don't even need to pay money fo…

That’s awesome, but I think we’re kinda talking past each other. I was responding to the claim that these models represent the largest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. In order for that to be true, these models, closed or open, need to have value for average people. I don’t see that at all. Most use it as a glorified google, some are actively harmed by the sycophantic tendencies of the models.

Edit: I’d like to add that I personally get a lot of value out of the models. They’ve helped me learn to do frontend development very quickly at my job. That said, that hasn’t translated into higher pay. The expectations have risen with employee capacity.

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

#93

Post by danielmarkbruce »

echelon wrote: post #90
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The most useful models are image, video, and audio models This is wrong. The vast majority of revenue is being generated by text models because they are so useful.

> they are so useful. Enterprise doesn't know how to use these models to achieve business outcomes. These subscriptions will unwind, and when they do, it'll be a bloodbath.

I work in an enterprise using LLMs all over the place, well. Our spending is only going to go one way, up.

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

#94

Post by ryandv »

dfabulich wrote: post #74
ryandv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For, on the one hand, there is the real world, and on the other, a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols; all civilization depends on them; but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth; and our names about ourselves, ou…

I think we might be on the same page at last. The last refuge of the Cartesian is always, "My argument is correct in an ineffable way that I couldn't possibly write down." "Cogito ergo sum" presents itself as a self-evident deduction, the one guaranteed universally agreeable truth, but, when you investigate it a little… oh, well, it's really more of a vibe than an argument , and isn't "logical argument" really a monk…

This is some impressive sophistry.

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

#95

Post by tim333 »

IntrepidPig wrote: post #8

I always felt like one of reasons LLMs are so good is that they piggyback on the many years that have gone into developing language as an information representation/compression format. I don’t know if there’s anything similar a world model can take advantage of. That being said there have been models which are pretty effective at other things that don’t use language, so maybe it’s a non issue.

There's a lot of info about the world in video and photographs. A lot of how we learn is seeing things. Plus interacting of course.

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

#96

Post by tim333 »

m-xtof wrote: post #51

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.

It's often the way with philosophy. Anyone can make a philosophical argument really.

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

#97

Post by pxc »

ripe wrote: post #30

And the pendulum swings back toward representation. It is becoming clear that the LLM approach is not adequate to reach what John McCarthy called human-level intelligence: Between us and human-level intelligence lie many problems. They can be summarized as that of succeeding in the "common-sense informatic situation". [1] And the search continues... [1] https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/human.pdf

> It is becoming clear that the LLM approach is not adequate to reach what John McCarthy called human-level intelligence

Perhaps paradoxically, if/as this becomes a consensus view, I can be more excited about AI. I am an "AI skeptic" not in principle, but with respect to the current intertwined investment and hype cycles surrounding "AI".

Absent the overblown hype, I can become more interested in the real possibilities (both immediate, using existing ML methods; and the remote, theoretical capabilities follow from what I think about minds and computers in general) again.

I think when this blows over I can also feel freer to appreciate some of the genuinely cool tricks LLMs can perform.

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

#98

Post by beeflet »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #92
beeflet wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the cost, but the freedom to do what you want... With open weight models I can run them on my own hardware on the edge, work with data I am not cool with uploading, experiment with different interfaces, use them for things the original trainers did not intend, even retrain the model a bit. I am developing a p2p program where the model runs on the end user's computer. So I don't even need to pay money fo…

That’s awesome, but I think we’re kinda talking past each other. I was responding to the claim that these models represent the largest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. In order for that to be true, these models, closed or open, need to have value for average people. I don’t see that at all. Most use it as a glorified google, some are actively harmed by the sycophantic tendencies of the models. Edit: I’d…

Well that makes sense. Perhaps it is not a transfer of wealth to the poor, but a transfer of power to the middle class.

I would say this: in the future I think we are gonna have all sorts of robotics that will be able to use LLMs and vision models and stuff to do basic reason and coordination to automate a ton of tasks. The average person is basically going to be able to fit a micro-factory in their house that can knit all of their clothes, make circuit boards for all of the computers they need, stitch their wounds together, and such.

In the future, we won't even need to engage in the economy of mass production, and we will basically all be low effort self-sufficient sustainable farmers and manufacturers due to AI reducing the effectiveness of economies of scale.

No one will have conventional jobs, so we will each recreate the old economy on a tiny scale to avoid the expensive monopolies. A single person's job would be like operating a tiny factory that produces a certain type of insulin or a certain antibiotic, or some sort of resistor or tobacco or something. Like the idea of family farms extended to the industrial domain.

And all of this progress is being taken on for free at massive cost by these AI companies that think it will have the exact opposite effect, which is monetizable.

I think that LLMs can be used as a far more advanced search than google. Imagine you have some project that requires a certain part. You could spend hours browsing the internet for the best deal, or you run a local LLM that scrapes websites and does the shipping calculations and runs a reasoning model to decide if it is a good fit based on the criteria you give it, etc. You essentially have the shopping done for you, it is just a matter of one person designing the framework and open sourcing it.

Most searching isn't so much finding a direct answer to your query, but scoping out a general field of information where you don't even know what it is you want to know. LLMs give us the opportunity to script general reasoning tasks.

Maybe it is bad or neutral for labor in the short term, but in the long run I think it is worse for capital. A lot of the moat that capital has is the ability to organize labor. If anyone with a computer can do the work of 100 men, then when the 100 men get laid off they will all ask themselves "why can't I also just start a competitor where I automate all the tasks in the company?".

Thanks for reading my TED talk.

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

#99

Post by gugagore »

IntrepidPig wrote: post #8

I always felt like one of reasons LLMs are so good is that they piggyback on the many years that have gone into developing language as an information representation/compression format. I don’t know if there’s anything similar a world model can take advantage of. That being said there have been models which are pretty effective at other things that don’t use language, so maybe it’s a non issue.

Another way to make the same point is to observe that every single society has language.

But only some groups have the ability to systematically encode language as writing.

Writing is a technological marvel.

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

#100

Post by vlovich123 »

beeflet wrote: post #58
vlovich123 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the artist the paint brush or the mind behind it creating the vision?

A lot of vfx today is automated and things are possible that we’re just too cost prohibitive before. You could say “who wants to see digital art”. The moat is the artist realizing their vision - for the same $ spend you get significantly more art or higher quality art (eg first pass by AI with humans doing the refinement steps).

The boom in television is because of plummeting production and distribution costs for example

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