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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

#181

Post by alecco »

oefrha wrote: post #88
boccaff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Llama wasn’t Yann LeCun’s work and he was openly critical of LLMs, so it’s not very relevant in this context. Source: himself https://x.com/ylecun/status/1993840625142436160 (“I never worked on any Llama.”) and a million previous reports and tweets from him.

> My only contribution was to push for Llama 2 to be open sourced.

Quite a big contribution in practice.

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

#182

Post by oefrha »

alecco wrote: post #181
oefrha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Llama wasn’t Yann LeCun’s work and he was openly critical of LLMs, so it’s not very relevant in this context. Source: himself https://x.com/ylecun/status/1993840625142436160 (“I never worked on any Llama.”) and a million previous reports and tweets from him.

> My only contribution was to push for Llama 2 to be open sourced. Quite a big contribution in practice.

Sure, but I don't that's relevant in a startup with 1B VC money either. Meta can afford to (attempt to) commoditize their complement.

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

#183

Post by DeathArrow »

dr_hooo wrote: post #156
pama wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate academia. Any academic that reads these two sentences only focuses on the first one: He has a named chair at Courant. In Germany, being a a Prof is added to your ID card/passport and becomes part of your official name, like knighthood in other countries.

No true regarding the IDs, only PhD titles can be added. Not job descriptions. Source: academia person in Germany.

It seems Germans add their PhD titles even to their nicknames. :)

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

#184

Post by RamblingCTO »

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-...

Which would be a good idea, as a European. I'd hate to see the investment go to waste on taxes that are spent on stupid shit anyway. Should go into R&D not fighting bureaucracy.

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

#185

Post by charcircuit »

andy12_ wrote: post #30
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 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…

Agents have the ability of continual learning.

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

#186

Post by omegastick »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #7

Why world model? To emulate how we became sentient? A "world" is just senses. In a way the context is one sense. A digital only world is still a world. I think more success is in a model having high level needs and aspirations that are borne from lower level needs. Model architecture also needs to shift to multiple autonomous systems that interact, in the same ways our brains work - there's a lot under the surface in…

Because if you have an explicit world model you can optimize against it.

It sounds like you are imagining tacking a world model onto an LLM. That's one approach but not what LeCun advocates for.

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

#187

Post by droidjj »

verdverm wrote: post #173
fs111 wrote: post #45

https://archive.is/20260310070651/https://www.ft.com/content...

Link does not work, goes into loop at verify human check with some weird redirect Looks like you appended the original URL to the end

Huh, it's working for me (on Firefox).

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

#188

Post by andy12_ »

charcircuit wrote: post #185
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…

Agents have the ability of continual learning.

Putting stuff you have learned into a markdown file is a very "shallow" version of continual learning. It can remember facts, yes, but I doubt a model can master new out-of-distribution tasks this way. If anything, I think that Google's Titans[1] and Hope[2] architectures are more aligned with true continual learning (without being actual continual learning still, which is why they call it "test-time memorization").

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00663

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24695

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

#189

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Looks like they'll be hiring on in Montreal in addition to Paris (and NYC and Signapore): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ami

I hope they grow that office like crazy. This would be really good for Canada. We have (or have had) the AI talent here (though maybe less so overall in Montreal than in Toronto/Waterloo and Vancouver and Edmonton).

And I hope Carney is promoting the crap out of this and making it worth their while to build that office out.

I don't really do Python or large scale learning etc, so don't see a path for myself to apply there but I hope this sparks some employment growth here in Canada. Smart choice to go with bilingual Montreal.

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

#190

Post by Insanity »

jsnell wrote: post #117
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.

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 I hear that 'just scale language models' suddenly created something that's true AGI, indistinguishable from human intelligence.

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