Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nasdaq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 680 posts

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

#251

Post by Amadiro »

Hendrikto wrote: post #203
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.

That's a quite different thing, OpenAI has billions of USD/year cash flow, and when you have that there's many many potential way to achieve profitability on different time horizons. It's not a situation of chance but a situation of choice.

Anyway, how much that matters for an investor is hard to form a clear answer to - investors are after all not directly looking for profitability as such, but for valuation growth. The two are linked but not the same -- any investor in OpenAI today probably also places themselves into a game of chance, betting on OpenAI making more breakthroughs and increasing the cash flow even more -- not just becoming profitable at the same rate of cash flow. So there's still some of the same risk baked into this investment.

But with a new startup like LeCun's is going to be, it's 100% on the risk side and 0% on the optionality side. The path to profitability for a startup would be something like 1) a breakthrough is made 2) that breakthrough is utilized in a way that generates cash flow 3) the company becomes profitable (and at this point hopefully the valuation is good.)

There's a lot of things that can go wrong at every step here (aside from the obvious), including e.g. making a breakthrough that doesn't represent a defensible mote for your startup, failing to build the structure of the business necessary to generate cashflow, ... OpenAI et al already have a lot of that behind them, and while that doesn't mean that they don't face upcoming risks and challenges, the huge amount of cashflow they have available helps them overcome these issues far more easily than a startup, which will stop solving problems if you stop feeding money into it.

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

#252

Post by sakex »

Jackson__ wrote: post #166

From the outside, it always looked like they gave LeCun just barely enough compute for small scale experiments. They'd publish a promising new paper, show it works at a small scale, then not use it at all for any of their large AI runs. I would have loved to see a VLM utilizing JEPA for example, but it simply never happened.

I'd be surprised if they didn't scale it up.

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

#253

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

sidcool wrote: post #91
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.

I won't be surprised if Musk hires him. But I hear LeCun hates the guts of Musk.

Musk doesn't appear interested in AI research - he's basically doing the same as Meta and just pursuing me-too SOTA LLMs and image generation at X.ai.

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

#254

Post by tonii141 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #207
tonii141 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m not demanding anything, I’m pointing out that performance tends to degrade as context scales, which follows from current LLM architectures as autoregressive models.

In that sense, Yann was right.

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

#255

Post by sgt »

curiouscube wrote: post #210
sebmellen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obse…

So... that seems like possible path towards AGI. Doesn't it?

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

#256

Post by blutoot »

sigbottle wrote: post #202
blutoot wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#258

Post by lofaszvanitt »

motbus3 wrote: post #88
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 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

And Carmack complained about the bureaucracy hell that is Facebook.

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

#259

Post by breppp »

drexlspivey wrote: post #201
breppp wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For all of your questions Meta would need a huge research/GPU investment, so that still holds.

In any case if I have to guess, we will see shallow things like the Sora app, a video generation tiktok social network and deeper integration like fake influencers, content generation that fits your preferences and ad publishers preferences

a more evil incarnation of this might be a social network where you aren't sure who is real and who isn't. This will probably be a natural evolution of the need to bootstrap a social network with people and replacing these with LLMs

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

#260

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

curiouscube wrote: post #210
sebmellen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obse…

Learning from the real world, including how it responds to your own actions, is the only way to achieve real-world competency, intelligence, reasoning and creativity, including going beyond human intelligence.

The capabilities of LLMs are limited by what's in their training data. You can use all the tricks in the book to squeeze the most out of that - RL, synthetic data, agentic loops, tools, etc, but at the end of the day their core intelligence and understanding is limited by that data and their auto-regressive training. They are built for mimicry, not creativity and intelligence.

Post reply on HN