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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

#71

Post by davidfarrell »

Unearned5161 wrote: post #57
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #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 (ground…

I have a pet peeve with the concept of "a genuinely novel discovery or invention", what do you imagine this to be? Can you point me towards a discovery or invention that was "genuinely novel", ever? I don't think it makes sense conceptually unless you're literally referring to discovering new physical things like elements or something. Humans are remixers of ideas. That's all we do all the time. Our thoughts and acti…

W Brian Arthur's book "The Nature of Technology" provides a framework for classifying new technology as elemental vs innovative that I find helpful. For example the Huntley-Mcllroy diff operates on the phenomenon that ordered correspondence survives editing. That was an invention (discovery of a natural phenomenon and a means to harness it). Myers diff improves the performance by exploiting the fact that text changes are sparse. That's innovation. A python app using libdiff, that's engineering. And then you might say in terms of "descendants": invention > innovation > engineering. But it's just a perspective.

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

#72

Post by _giorgio_ »

Oras wrote: post #58

> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have a…

I can’t reconcile this dichotomy: most of the landmark deep learning papers were developed with what, by today’s standards, were almost ridiculously small training budgets — from Transformers to dropout, and so on.

So I keep wondering: if his idea is really that good — and I genuinely hope it is — why hasn’t it led to anything truly groundbreaking yet? It can’t just be a matter of needing more data or more researchers. You tell me :-D

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

#73

Post by kergonath »

10xDev wrote: post #52
andy12_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that models aren't continually updating seems more like a feature. I want to know the model is exactly the same as it was the last time I used it. Any new information it needs can be stored in its context window or stored in a file to read the next it needs to access it.

> The fact that models aren't continually updating seems more like a feature.

I think this is true to some extent: we like our tools to be predictable. But we’ve already made one jump by going from deterministic programs to stochastic models. I am sure the moment a self-evolutive AI shows up that clears the "useful enough" threshold we’ll make that jump as well.

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

#74

Post by _giorgio_ »

mkl wrote: post #70

Seems like it's the second largest seed round anywhere after Thinking Machines Labs? https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-seed-round-ai-th... That article is from June 2025 so may be out of date, and the definition of "seed round" is a bit fuzzy.

Thinking Machines looks half-dead already.

The giant seed round proves investors were willing to fund Mira Murati, not that the company had built anything durable.

Within months, it had already lost cofounder Andrew Tulloch to Meta, then cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz plus researcher Sam Schoenholz to OpenAI; WIRED also reported that at least three other researchers left. At that point, citing it as evidence of real competitive momentum feels weak.

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

#75

Post by kergonath »

energy123 wrote: post #65
ForHackernews wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://medium.com/state-of-the-art-technology/world-models-... > One major critique LeCun raises is that LLMs operate only in the realm of language, which is a simple, discrete space compared to the continuous, complex physical world we live in. LLMs can solve math problems or answer trivia because such tasks reduce to pattern completion on text, but they lack any meaningful grounding in physical reality. LeCun poin…

But they don't only operate on language? They operate on token sequences, which can be images, coordinates, time, language, etc.

It’s an interesting observation, but I think you have it backwards. The examples you give are all using discrete symbols to represent something real and communicating this description to other entities. I would argue that all your examples are languages.

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

#76

Post by 0x3f »

Unearned5161 wrote: post #57
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #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 (ground…

I have a pet peeve with the concept of "a genuinely novel discovery or invention", what do you imagine this to be? Can you point me towards a discovery or invention that was "genuinely novel", ever? I don't think it makes sense conceptually unless you're literally referring to discovering new physical things like elements or something. Humans are remixers of ideas. That's all we do all the time. Our thoughts and acti…

Novel things can be incremental. I don't think LLMs can do that either, at least I've never seen one do it.

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

#77

Post by boccaff »

Oras wrote: post #58

> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have a…

llama models pushed the envelope for a while, and having them "open-weight" allowed a lot of tinkering. I would say that most of fine tuned evolved from work on top of llama models.

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

#78

Post by sylware »

If, for even 1s, they get in a position which is threatening, in any way, Big Tech AI (mostly US based if not all), they will be raided by international finance to be dismantled and poached hardcore with some massive US "investment funds" (which looks more and more as "weaponized" international finance!!). Only china is very immune to international finance. Those funds have tens of thousands of billions of $, basically, in a world of money, there is near zero resistance.

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

#79

Post by fnands »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #51
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #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 a…

There seem to be other news articles mentioning that they are setting up in Singapore as their base. https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ai-godfather-raises-1-...

Probably just a satellite office.

Might be to be close to some of Yann's collaborators like Xavier Bresson at NUS

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

#80

Post by roromainmain »

Signez wrote: post #56
re-thc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are setting up in Singapore as their base Europe in general has been tightening up their rules / taxes / laws around startups / companies especially tech and remote. It's been less friendly. these days.

Yann Le Cun litteraly said this morning on the radio in France that it is headquarted in Paris and will pay taxes in France. Go figure…

For such companies, France also offers generous R&D tax credits (Crédit Impôt Recherche): companies can recover roughly 30% of eligible R&D expenses incurred in France as a tax credit, which can eventually be refunded (in cash) if the company has no taxable profit.
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