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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

#111

Post by bonesss »

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…

Genuinely novel discovery or invention?

Einstein’s theory of relativity springs to mind, which is deeply counter-intuitive and relies on the interaction of forces unknowable to our basic Newtonian senses.

There’s an argument that it’s all turtles (someone told him about universes, he read about gravity, etc), but there are novel maths and novel types of math that arise around and for such theories which would indicate an objective positive expansion of understanding and concept volume.

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

#112

Post by net01 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #110

This could have been 1000 seed rounds. We are creating technological deserts by going all-in on AI and star personalities.

Because for these investors the opportunity cost of this is higher than other startups.

I agree with you; there should be more diversity in investments in EU startups, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not my money.

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

#113

Post by roromainmain »

storus wrote: post #109
roromainmain wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that alongside 100% of R&D expenses amortized in taxes when a company has taxable profit covering them?

Yes indeed, if the company is profitable.

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

#114

Post by brandonb »

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…

LeCun's technical approach with AMI will likely be based on JEPA, which is also a very different approach than most US-based or Chinese AI labs are taking.

If you're looking to learn about JEPA, LeCun's vision document "A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence" is long but sketches out a very comprehensive vision of AI research: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

Training JEPA models within reach, even for startups. For example, we're a 3-person startup who trained a health timeseries JEPA. There are JEPA models for computer vision and (even) for LLMs.

You don't need a $1B seed round to do interesting things here. We need more interesting, orthogonal ideas in AI. So I think it's good we're going to have a heavyweight lab in Europe alongside the US and China.

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

#115

Post by torginus »

andy12_ wrote: post #62
zelphirkalt wrote: post #37

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. 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 t…

> Even with continuous backpropagation and "learning" That's what I said. Backpropagation cannot be enough; that's not how neurons work in the slightest. When you put biological neurons in a Pong environment they learn to play not through some kind of loss or reward function; they self-organize to avoid unpredictable stimulation. As far as I know, no architecture learns in such an unsupervised way. https://www.scienc…

Forgive me for being ignorant - but 'loss' in supervised learning ML context encode the difference between how unlikely (high loss) or likely (low loss) was the network in predicting the output based on the input.

This sounds very similar to me as to what neurons do (avoid unpredictable stimulation)

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

vit05 wrote: post #107
az226 wrote: post #104

Yann LeCun seeks $5B+ valuation for world model startup AMI (Amilabs). He has hired LeBrun to the helm as CEO. AMI has also hired LeFunde as CFO and LeTune as head of post-training. They’re also considering hiring LeMune as Head of Growth and LePrune to lead inference efficiency. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-confirms-his-ne...

Why didn't they just call it LeLabs?

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by jsnell »

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…

I don't think it's "regardless", your opinion on LeCun being right should be highly correlated to your opinion on whether this is good for Europe.

If you think that LLMs are sufficient and RSI is imminent (<1 year), this is horrible for Europe. It is a distracting boondoggle exactly at the wrong time.

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

#118

Post by a-french-anon »

energy123 wrote: post #38
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…

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.

Kinda a moot point in my eyes because I very much doubt you can arrive at the same result without the same learning process.

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

#119

Post by dude250711 »

general1465 wrote: post #13

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.

Yes, the faster they get used to the thought that loosing a billion is not a big deal, the better.

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

#120

Post by adamors »

vit05 wrote: post #107
az226 wrote: post #104

Yann LeCun seeks $5B+ valuation for world model startup AMI (Amilabs). He has hired LeBrun to the helm as CEO. AMI has also hired LeFunde as CFO and LeTune as head of post-training. They’re also considering hiring LeMune as Head of Growth and LePrune to lead inference efficiency. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-confirms-his-ne...

Why didn't they just call it LeLabs?

I was thinking the same, are all people he hires LeSomething like those working at Bolson Construction having -son as a suffix.
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