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Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

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Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#11
Justifiable.

There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models.

LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (grounded in spatiotemporal understanding, not just language patterns) would be attacking what I see as the actual bottleneck to AGI. Even if they succeed only partially, they may unlock the kind of generalization and creative spark that current LLMs structurally can't reach.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#12

Justifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (ground…

Whether it is text or an image, it is just bits for a computer. A token can represent anything.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#14

Here you can see why it is so hard to compete as European startup with US startups - abysmal access to money. Investment of 1B USD in Europe is glorified as largest seed ever, but in USA it is another Tuesday.

A billion seed is not an every day event anywhere.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#15
Once again, US companies and VCs are in this seed round. Just like Mistral with their seed round.

Europe again missing out, until AMI reaches a much higher valuation with an obvious use case in robotics.

Either AMI reaches over $100B+ valuation (likely) or it becomes a Thinking Machines Lab with investors questioning its valuation. (very unlikely since world models has a use-case in vision and robotics)

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#16
post #14

Here you can see why it is so hard to compete as European startup with US startups - abysmal access to money. Investment of 1B USD in Europe is glorified as largest seed ever, but in USA it is another Tuesday.

A billion seed is not an every day event anywhere.

Not at all. A quick google turns up evidence of 4. There may be more but I think probably not many.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#17
post #14

Here you can see why it is so hard to compete as European startup with US startups - abysmal access to money. Investment of 1B USD in Europe is glorified as largest seed ever, but in USA it is another Tuesday.

A billion seed is not an every day event anywhere.

For a foundation AI lab with a world famous AI researcher at the helm though, it's not so impressive. Won't even touch the sides of the hardware costs they'd need to be anywhere near competitive

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#18

Justifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (ground…

There will be no "unlocking of AGI" until we develop a new science capable of artificial comprehension. Comprehension is the cornucopia that produces everything we are, given raw stimulus an entire communicating Universe is generated with a plethora of highly advanceds predator/prey characters in an infinitely complex dynamic, and human science and technology have no lead how to artificially make sense of that in a simultaneous unifying whole. That's comprehension.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#19
post #12

Justifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (ground…

Whether it is text or an image, it is just bits for a computer. A token can represent anything.

Sure, but don't conflate the representation format with the structure of what's being represented.

Everything is bits to a computer, but text training data captures the flattened, after-the-fact residue of baseline human thought: Someone's written description of how something works. (At best!)

A world model would need to capture the underlying causal, spatial, and temporal structure of reality itself -- the thing itself, that which generates those descriptions.

You can tokenize an image just as easily as a sentence, sure, but a pile of images and text won't give you a relation between the system and the world. A world model, in theory, can. I mean, we ought to be sufficient proof of this, in a sense...

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