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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

#31

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 startup getting 1B net worth is so rare that such companies are called unicorns. As the other commenter pointed out, this is 1B seed.

actually, they raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation.

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

#32
Regardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI, this is probably a good thing for Europe. We need more well capitalized labs that aren't US or China centric and while I do like Mistral, they just haven't been keeping up on the frontier of model performance and seem like they've sort of pivoted into being integration specialists and consultants for EU corporations. That's fine and they've got to make money, but fully ceding the research front is not a good way to keep the EU competitive.

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

#33

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.

Europeans have free healthcare and retirement. They consider putting their money with long term benefits not just become CEO on Tuesday and declare bankruptcy on Wednesday.

Free healthcare and retirement ?

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

#34

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…

why LLMs (transformers trained on multimodal token sequences, potentially containing spatiotemporal information) can't be a world model?

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

#35

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.

Europeans have free healthcare and retirement. They consider putting their money with long term benefits not just become CEO on Tuesday and declare bankruptcy on Wednesday.

It is not free, we just pay taxes.

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

#36

Adds up : We are seeing a clear exodus of both capital and talent from the US - with the current US administration’s shift toward cronyism - and the EU stands as the most compelling alternative with a uniform market of 500 million people and the last major federation truly committed to the rule of law.

"Exodus of capital" as if OpenAI didn't just raise 115b

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

#37
post #30

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…

I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…

> I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation.

Even with continuous backpropagation and "learning", enriching the training data, so called online-learning, the limitations will not disappear. The LLMs will not be able to conclude things about the world based on fact and deduction. They only consider what is likely from their training data. They will not foresee/anticipate events, that are unlikely or non-existent in their training data, but are bound to happen due to real world circumstances. They are not intelligent in that way.

Whether humans always apply that much effort to conclude these things is another question. The point is, that humans fundamentally are capable of doing that, while LLMs are structurally not.

The problems are structural/architectural. I think it will take another 2-3 major leaps in architectures, before these AI models reach human level general intelligence, if they ever reach it. So far they can "merely" often "fake it" when things are statistically common in their training data.

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

#38
post #30

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…

I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…

I don't understand why online learning is that necessary. If you took Einstein at 40 and surgically removed his hippocampus so he can't learn anything he didn't already know (meaning no online learning), that's still a very useful AGI. A hippocampus is a nice upgrade to that, but not super obviously on the critical path.

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

#39
post #30

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…

I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…

You could have continual learning on text and still be stuck in the same "remixing baseline human communications" trap. It's a nasty one, very hard to avoid, possibly even structurally unavoidable.

As for the "just put a vision LLM in a robot body" suggestion: People are trying this (e.g. Physical Intelligence) and it looks like it's extraordinarily hard! The results so far suggest that bolting perception and embodiment onto a language-model core doesn't produce any kind of causal understanding. The architecture behind the integration of sensory streams, persistent object representations, and modeling time and causality is critically important... and that's where world models come in.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europeans have free healthcare and retirement. They consider putting their money with long term benefits not just become CEO on Tuesday and declare bankruptcy on Wednesday.

Free healthcare and retirement ?

It is an universal system but definitely not free . In Germany you pay on average 17.5% of your salary for healthcare insurance and 18.6% for retirement . However contribution caps exists . 70k for healthcare and 100k for retirement .
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