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

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

#201

Post by drexlspivey »

breppp wrote: post #189
drexlspivey wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do LLMs help with clicks and attention minutes? Why do they spend $100+B a year in AI capex, more than Google and Microsoft that actually rent AI compute to clients? What are they going to do with all that compute? It’s all so confusing

It might be just me, but in my opinion facebook platforms are way past the "content from your friends phase", but is full of cheap peddled viral content. If that content becomes even cheaper, of higher quality and highly tailored to you, that is probably worth a lot of money, or at least worth not losing your entire company by a new competitor

But practically speaking, is Meta going to be generating text or video content itself? Are they going to offer some kind of creator tools so you can use it to create video as a user and they need the compute for that? Do they even have a video generation model?

The future is here folks, join us as we build this giant slop machine in order to sell new socks to boomers.

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

#202

Post by sigbottle »

blutoot wrote: post #167
xuancanh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are the types that want academic freedom in a cut-throat industry setup and conversely never fit into academia because their profiles and growth ambitions far exceed what an academic research lab can afford (barring some marquee names). It's an unfortunate paradox.

Maybe it's time for Bell Labs 2?

I guess everyone is racing towards AGI in a few years or whatever so it's kind of impossible to cultivate that environment.

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

#203

Post by Hendrikto »

albertzeyer wrote: post #144

I wonder, what LeCun wants to do is more fundamental research, i.e. where the timeline to being useful is much longer, maybe 5-10 years at least, and also much more uncertain. How does this fit together with a startup? Would investors happily invest into this knowing not to expect anything in return for at least the next 5-10 years?

> Would investors happily invest into this knowing not to expect anything in return for at least the next 5-10 years?

Oh, you mean like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and xAI? None of them are profitable.

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

#204

Post by Hendrikto »

aurareturn wrote: post #191
bigtones wrote: 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?

Not necessarily. Training could be more efficient.

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

#205

Post by blitzar »

Tepix wrote: post #150
motbus3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck hired John Carmack and got nothing of it On the other hand, it was only lecunn avoiding meta to go 100p evil creepy mode too

Carmack laid the foundation for the all-in-one VR headsets.

Hopefully one day, in a galaxy far far away, someone builds something on those foundations.

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

#206

Post by aiven »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #82
sebmellen wrote: post #2

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.

Zuck did this on purpose, humiliating LeCun so he would leave. Despite LeCun being proved wrong on LLMs capabilities such as reasoning, he remained extremely negative, not exactly inspiring leadership to the Meta Ai team, he had to go.

But LLMs still can't reason... in a reasonable sense. No matter how you look at it, it is still a statistical model that guesses next word, it doesn't think/reason per se.

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

#207

Post by ACCount37 »

tonii141 wrote: post #139
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) no, gemini 2.5 was shown to "win" gold w/o tools. - https://arxiv.org/html/2507.15855v1 b) reductionism isn't worth our time. Planning works in the real world, today. (try any agentic tool like cc/codex/whatever). And if you're set on the purist view, there's mounting evidence from anthropic that there is planning in the core of an LLM. c) so ... not true? Long context works today. This is simply moving goalposts…

a) That "no-tools" win depends on prompt orchestration which can still be categorized as tooling. b) Next-token training doesn’t magically grant inner long-horizon planners.. c) Long context ≠ robust at any length. Degradation with scale remains. Not moving goalposts, just keeping terms precise.

My man, you're literally moving all the goalposts as we speak.

It's not just "long context" - you demand "infinite context" and "any length" now. Even humans don't have that. "No tools" is no longer enough - what, do you demand "no prompts" now too? Having LLMs decompose tasks and prompt each other the way humans do is suddenly a no-no?

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

sharmajai wrote: post #196
xuancanh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by curiouscube »

sebmellen wrote: post #30
numpy-thagoras wrote: post #15

Good. The world model is absolutely the right play in my opinion. AI Agents like LLMs make great use of pre-computed information. Providing a comprehensive but efficient world model (one where more detail is available wherever one is paying more attention given a specific task) will definitely eke out new autonomous agents. Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI. I wish…

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

One theory of how humans work is the so called predictive coding approach. Basically the theory assumes that human brains work similar to a kalman filter, that is, we have an internal model of the world that does a prediction of the world and then checks if the prediction is congruent with the observed changes in reality. Learning then comes down to minimizing the error between this internal model and the actual observations, this is sometimes called the free energy principle. Specifically when researchers are talking about world models they tend to refer to internal models that model the actual external world, that is they can predict what happens next based on input streams like vision.

Why is this idea of a world model helpful? Because it allows multiple interesting things, like predict what happens next, model counterfactuals (what would happen if I do X or don't do X) and many other things that tend to be needed for actual principled reasoning.

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