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Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

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191–200 of 680 posts

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#191
post #5

Fi Fi Lee also recently founded a new AI startup called World Labs, which focus on creating AI world models with spatial intelligence to understand and interact with the 3D world, unlike current LLM AI that primarily processes 2D images and text. Almost exactly the same focus as Yann LeCun's new venture stated in the parent article.

They'd need an order of magnitude more compute in order to train an AI with so much 3D data?

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#192
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.

>the huge impact they're already having In the software development world yes, outside of that, virtually none. Yes, you can transcribe a video call in Office, yes, but that's not ground breaking. I dare you to list 10 impacts on different fields, excluding tech and including at least half blue collar fields and at least half white collar fields , at different levels from the lowest to the highest in the company hier…

Personally, I find myself using LLMs more than Google now, even for non-development tasks. I think this shift is going to become the new normal (if it isn't already).

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#193
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.

>the huge impact they're already having In the software development world yes, outside of that, virtually none. Yes, you can transcribe a video call in Office, yes, but that's not ground breaking. I dare you to list 10 impacts on different fields, excluding tech and including at least half blue collar fields and at least half white collar fields , at different levels from the lowest to the highest in the company hier…

I don't think you'll find many here believing anything outside tech is worth investing into, it's schizophrenic isn't it.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLAMA sucks, that's the problem. Do you see value in it? Pytorch, used by everyone, yet no real value to stockholders, META even "fired" the creator of pytorch days ago. SAM is great, what value does it bring to META business? Nobody knows about it. Great tool BTW. JEPA is a failure (will it get better? I hope so.) Did you read my list?

Okay. Now explain the value that a halo car brings to car companies.

3.5

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#195
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is also not very interested in LLMs, and that seems to be Zuck's top priority.

Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.

He's quoted in OP as calling them 'useful but fundamentally limited'; that seems correct, and not at all like he's denying their utility.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#196

Making LeCun report to Wang was the most boneheaded move imaginable. But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.

In industry research, someone in a chief position like LeCun should know how to balance long-term research with short-term projects. However, for whatever reason, he consistently shows hostility toward LLMs and engineering projects, even though Llama and PyTorch are two of the most influential projects from Meta AI. His attitude doesn’t really match what is expected from a Chief position at a product company like Fac…

Product companies with deprioritized R&D wings are the first ones to die.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs get results is quite the bold statement. If they get results, they should be getting adopted, and they should be making money. This is all built on hazy promises. If you had marketable results, you wouldn't have to hide 20+ billion dollars of debt financing into an obscure SPV. LLMs are the most baffling piece of tech. They are incredible, and yet marred by their non-deterministic hallucinatory nature, and bound…

OpenAI and Anthropic are making north of 4B/year revenue so some companies have figured out the money making part. ChatGPT has some 800M users according to some calculations. Whether it's enough money today, enough money tomorrow, is of course a question but there is a lot of money. Users would not use them in a scale if they do not solve their problems.

It’s easy to make 1 billion by spending 10 billion. That’s not “making money” though, it is lighting it on fire.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs get results is quite the bold statement. If they get results, they should be getting adopted, and they should be making money. This is all built on hazy promises. If you had marketable results, you wouldn't have to hide 20+ billion dollars of debt financing into an obscure SPV. LLMs are the most baffling piece of tech. They are incredible, and yet marred by their non-deterministic hallucinatory nature, and bound…

LLMs get results, yes. They are getting adopted, and they are making money. Frontier models are all profitable . Inference is sold with a damn good margin, and the amounts of inference AI companies sell keeps rising. This necessitates putting more and more money into infrastructure. AI R&D is extremely expensive too, and this necessitates even more spending. A mistake I see people make over and over again is keeping…

In this comment you proceeded to basically reinvent the meaning of "profitable company", but sure. I won't even get into the point of comparing LLM to humans, because I choose not to engage with whoever doesn't have the human decency, humanistic compass, or basic phylosophical understanding of how putting LLMs and human labor on the same level to justify hallucinations and non-determinism is deranged and morally bankrupt.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#199
post #183
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also he always sounds like "I know this will not work". Dude are you a researcher? You're supposed to experiment and follow the results. That's what separates you from oracles and freaking philosophers or whatever.

He's speaking to the entire feedforward Transformer-based paradigm. He sees little point in continuing to try to squeeze more blood out of that stone and instead move on to more appropriate ways to model ontologies per se rather than the crude-for-what-we-use-them-for embedding-based methods that are popular today. I really resonate with his view due to my background in physics and information theory. I for one welco…

If the LLM hype doesn't cool down fast, we're probably looking at another AI winter. Appears to me like he's just trying to ensure he'll have funding for chasing the global maximum going forward.

Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

#200
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain this “world model” concept to me? How do you actually interface with a model like this?

He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He im…

Great strawman.
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