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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

#211

Post by Oras »

andreyk wrote: post #194
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…

"and we didn't see anything" is not justified at all. Meta absolutely has (or at least had) a word class industry AI lab and has published a ton of great work and open source models (granted their LLM open source stuff failed to keep up with chinese models in 2024/2025 ; their other open source stuff for thins like segmentation don't get enough credit though). Yann's main role was Chief AI Scientist, not any sort of…

I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did.

Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers.

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

#212

Post by 0x3f »

visarga wrote: post #202
Insanity wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see claims about AGI being reachable through large language models, it reminds me of the miasma theory of disease. Many respectable medical professionals were convinced this was true, and they viewed the entire world through this lens. They interpreted data in ways that aligned with a miasmatic view. Of course now we know this was delusional and it seems almost funny in retrospect. I feel the same way when…

> Whenever I see claims about AGI being reachable through large language models, it reminds me of the miasma theory of disease. Whenever I see people think the model architecture matters much, I think they have a magical view of AI. Progress comes from high quality data, the models are good as they are now. Of course you can still improve the models, but you get much more upside from data, or even better - from inter…

If model arch doesn't matter much how come transformers changed everything?

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

#213

Post by mrguyorama »

ForHackernews wrote: post #47
energy123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

>We don’t think the tasks that a cat can accomplish are smart, but in fact, they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

All the things we look at as "Smart" seem to be the things we struggle with, not what is objectively difficult, if that can even be defined.

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

#214

Post by magicalist »

Oras wrote: post #211
andreyk wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and we didn't see anything" is not justified at all. Meta absolutely has (or at least had) a word class industry AI lab and has published a ton of great work and open source models (granted their LLM open source stuff failed to keep up with chinese models in 2024/2025 ; their other open source stuff for thins like segmentation don't get enough credit though). Yann's main role was Chief AI Scientist, not any sort of…

I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did. Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers.

>> but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything

> I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did.

You were criticising his output at Facebook, though, but he was in the research group at facebook, not a product group, so it seems like we did actually see lots of things?

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

#215

Post by sebmellen »

devonkelley wrote: post #195
jsnell wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#216

Post by visarga »

0x3f wrote: post #212
visarga wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever I see claims about AGI being reachable through large language models, it reminds me of the miasma theory of disease. Whenever I see people think the model architecture matters much, I think they have a magical view of AI. Progress comes from high quality data, the models are good as they are now. Of course you can still improve the models, but you get much more upside from data, or even better - from inter…

If model arch doesn't matter much how come transformers changed everything?

Luck. RNNs can do it just as good, Mamba, S4, etc - for a given budget of compute and data. The larger the model the less architecture makes a difference. It will learn in any of the 10,000 variations that have been tried, and come about 10-15% close to the best. What you need is a data loop, or a data source of exceptional quality and size, data has more leverage. Architecture games reflect more on efficiency, some method can be 10x more efficient than another.

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

#217

Post by Oras »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #201
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…

That's such a terrible take. For a hot minute Meta had a top 3 LLM and open sourced the whole thing, even with LeCunn's reservations around the technology. At the same time Meta spat out huge breakthroughs in: - 3d model generation - Self-supervised label-free training (DINO). Remember Alexandr Wang built a multibillion dollar company just around having people in third world countries label data, so this is a huge br…

> - Self-supervised label-free training (DINO). Remember Alexandr Wang built a multibillion dollar company just around having people in third world countries label data, so this is a huge breakthrough.

If it was a breakthrough, why did Meta acquire Wang and his company? I'm genuinely curious.

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

#218

Post by energy123 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #199
energy123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really hate the world model terminology, but the actual low level gripe between LeCunn and autoregressive LLMs as they stand now is the fact that the loss function needs to reconstruct the entirety of the input. Anything less than pixel perfect reconstruction on images is penalized. Token by token reconstruction also is biased towards that same level of granularity. The density of information in the spatiotemporal…

Isn't the Sora video model a ViT with spatiotemporal inputs (so they've found a way to compress that down), but at the same time LeCunn wouldn't consider that a world model?

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

#219

Post by crystal_revenge »

gandalfstoe wrote: post #206
crystal_revenge wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fully ceding the research front is not a good way to keep the EU competitive Tech is ultimately a red herring as far as what's needed to keep the EU competitive. The EU has a trillion dollar hole[0] to fill if they want to replace US military presence, and current net import over 50% of their energy. Unfortunately the current situation in Iran is not helping either of these as they constrains energy further and ris…

Right, they really need a military industrial complex to be "competitive" :eyeroll. Are you suggesting regressing to the stone age?

Europe doesn't want to be reliant (understandably) on the US military for defense, because if they are, as Trump has demonstrated, they will be pressured to make concessions not in their interests.

The need for a military is tightly coupled with the EU's need for energy. You can see this in the immediate impact that the war in Iran has had on Germany's natural gas prices [0]. But already unable to defend itself from Russia, EU countries are in a tough spot since they can't really afford to expend military resources defending their energy needs, and yet also don't have the energy independence to ignore these military engagements without risk. Meanwhile Russia has spend the last 4 years transition to a wartime economy and is getting hungry for expanded resource acquisition.

The world hasn't fundamentally changed since the stone age: humans need resources to survive and if there aren't enough people for those resources then violence will decide who has access the them.

0. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/germany-natural-gas-t...

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

#220

Post by smugma »

brandonb wrote: post #153
sanderjd wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you published anything about your health time series model? Sounds interesting!

Sure! Here’s a description: https://www.empirical.health/blog/wearable-foundation-model-...

Very interesting. I am keenly interested in this space and coincidentally had my blood drawn this morning.

That said, have you considered that “Measure 100+ biomarkers with a single blood draw” combined with "heart health is a solved problem” reads a lot like Theranos?

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