271–280 of 680 posts
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So not his money ;)
But his responsability.
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I'm working toward AGI. I hope AGI can be used to automate work and make life easier for people.
>> non-$$ logic [...] aside from misanthropy > I hope AGI can be used to automate work You people need a PR guy, I'm serious. OpenAI is the first company I've ever seen that comes across as actively trying to be misanthropic in its messaging. I'm probably too old-fashioned, but this honestly sounds like Marlboro launching the slogan "lung cancer for the weak of mind".
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?
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I politely disagree - it is exactly an industry researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work, simply because the rest of the corporation cannot take such risks but must walk on more well-trodden paths. Corporate R&D teams are there to absorb risk, innovate, disrupt, create new fields, not for doing small incremental improvements. "If we know it works, it's not research." (Albert Einstein) I also agre…
Knowledge models, like ontologies, always seem suspect to me; like they promise a schema for crisp binary facts, when the world is full of probabilistic and fuzzy information loosely categorized by fallible humans based on an ever slowly shifting social consensus. Everything from the sorites paradox to leaky abstractions; everything real defies precise definition when you look closely at it, and when you try to abstr…
I don't disagree that the world is full of fuzziness. But the problem I have with this portrayal is that formal models are often normative rather than analytical. They create reality rather than being an interpretation or abstraction of reality.
People may well have a fuzzy idea of how their credit card works, but how it really works is formally defined by financial institutions. And this is not just true for software products. It's also largely true for manufactured products. Our world is very much shaped by artifacts and man-made rules.
Our probabilistic, fuzzy concepts are often simply a misconception. That doesn't mean it's not important of course. It is important for an AI to understand how people talk about things even if their idea of how these things work is flawed.
And then there is the sort of semi-formal language used in legal or scientific contexts that often has to be translated into formal models before it can become effective. Law makers almost never write algorithms (when they do, they are often buggy). But tax authorities and accounting software vendors do have to formally model the language in the law and then potentially change those formal definitions after court decisions.
My point is that the way in which the modeled, formal world interacts with probabilistic, fuzzy language and human actions is complex. In my opinion we will always need both. AIs ultimately need to understand both and be able to combine them just like (competent) humans do. AI "tool use" is a stop-gap. It's not a sufficient level of understanding.
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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.
No, I think hes suggesting that "world models" are more impactful. The issue for him inside meta is that there is already a research group looking at that, and are wildly more successful (in terms of getting research to product) and way fucking cheaper to run than FAIR.
Also LeCun is stuck weirdly in product land, rather than research (RL-R) which means he's not got the protection of Abrash to isolate him from the industrial stupidity that is the product council.
The models aren’t Chinese they are the entire world, unless I became Chinese without realizing
This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen. Researchers are getting rewarded with VC money to try what remains a science experiment. That used to be a bad word and now that gets rewarded with billions of dollars in valuation.
LeCun, who's been saying LLMs are a dead end for years, is finally putting his money where his mouth is. Watch for LeCun to raise an absolutely massive VC round.
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I politely disagree - it is exactly an industry researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work, simply because the rest of the corporation cannot take such risks but must walk on more well-trodden paths. Corporate R&D teams are there to absorb risk, innovate, disrupt, create new fields, not for doing small incremental improvements. "If we know it works, it's not research." (Albert Einstein) I also agre…
Knowledge models, like ontologies, always seem suspect to me; like they promise a schema for crisp binary facts, when the world is full of probabilistic and fuzzy information loosely categorized by fallible humans based on an ever slowly shifting social consensus. Everything from the sorites paradox to leaky abstractions; everything real defies precise definition when you look closely at it, and when you try to abstr…
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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.
This sounds crazy. We don't even know/can't define what human intelligence is or how it works , but we're trying to replicate it with AGI ?