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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'

#341

Post by tarsinge »

chaoz_ wrote: post #179
ACCount37 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was obviously him getting sidelined. And it's easy to see why. LLMs get results. None of the Yann LeCun's pet projects do. He had ample time to prove that his approach is promising, and he didn't.

I agree. I never understood LeCun's statement that we need to pivot toward the visual aspects of things because the bitrate of text is low while visual input through the eye is high. Text and languages contain structured information and encode a lot of real-world complexity (or it's "modelling" that). Not saying we won't pivot to visual data or world simulations, but he was clearly not the type of person to compete w…

Text and language contain only approximate information filtered through humans eyes and brains. Also animals don't have language and can show quite advanced capabilities compared to what we can currently do in robotics. And if you do enough mindfulness you can dissociate cognition/consciousness from language. I think we are lured because how important language is for us humans, but intuitively it's obvious to me language (and LLMs) are only a subcomponent, or even irrelevant for say self driving or robotics.

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

#342

Post by blutoot »

mehulashah wrote: post #277

Most of the folks on this topic are focused on Meta and Yann’s departure. But, I’m seeing something different. 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.

Yes - I had similar thoughts when I saw the word "startup" used alongside something so far-out (same 'critique" should apply to Fei-Fei Li's World Labs - https://www.worldlabs.ai). These are VC-funded research labs (and there is nothing wrong with tat). Calling them "startups" as if they are already working on an MVP on top of an unproven (and frankly non-existent) technology seems a little disingenuous to me.

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

#343

Post by baxtr »

mehulashah wrote: post #277

Most of the folks on this topic are focused on Meta and Yann’s departure. But, I’m seeing something different. 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.

I personally see this as a positive trend. VC in its earliest form was concerned with experiments that had high technology risk. I am thinking of companies like Genentech and scientists like biochemist Herbert Boyer, who had pioneered recombinant DNA technology.

After that, VC had become more like PE, investing in stuff that was working already but needed money to scale.

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

#344

Post by rco8786 »

brandall10 wrote: post #301
DebtDeflation wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been true for the last year or two, but it feels like we're at an inflection point. All of the announcements from OpenAI for the last couple of months have been product focused - Instant Checkout, AgentKit, etc. Anthropic seems 100% focused on Claude Code. We're not hearing as much about AGI/Superintelligence (thank goodness) as we were earlier this year, in fact the big labs aren't even talking much about the…

Meta hiring researchers en masse at $100m+ pay packages is fairly new, as of this summer. I don't know if that's indicative of the market as a whole though. Zuck just seems really gutted they fell behind with Llama 4.

"en masse" is a stretch

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

#345

Post by aswanson »

zikduruqe wrote: post #286
mehulashah wrote: post #277

Most of the folks on this topic are focused on Meta and Yann’s departure. But, I’m seeing something different. 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.

> This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen. You must have not lived through the dot com boom. There was almost everything under the sun was being sold under a website that started with an "e". ePets, ePlants, eStamps, eUnderwear, eStocks, eCards, eInvites.....

Even hardware. eMachines.

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

#346

Post by re-thc »

matt3D wrote: post #305
littlestymaar wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deepseek somehow didn't need $2T to happen.

I think the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble. If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI.

> the argument can be made that Deepseek is a state sponsored needle looking to pop another states bubble

Who says they don't make money? Same with open source software that offer a hosted version.

> If Deepseek is free it undermines the value of LLMs, so the value of these US companies is mainly speculation/FOMO over AGI

Freemium, open source and other models all exist. Does it undermine the value of e.g. Salesforce?

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

#347

Post by makestuff »

yogrish wrote: post #68
fxtentacle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs and Diffusion solve a completely different problem than world models. If you want to predict future text, you use an LLM. If you want to predict future frames in a video, you go with Diffusion. But what both of them lack is object permanence. If a car isn't visible in the input frame, it won't be visible in the output. But in the real world, there are A LOT of things that are invisible (image) or not mentioned b…

I think World models is way to go for Super Intelligence. One of teh patent i saw already going in this direction for Autonomous mobility is https://patents.google.com/patent/EP4379577A1 where synthetic data generation (visualization) is missing step in terms of our human intelligence.

This is the first time I have heard of world models. Based on my brief reading it does look like this is the idea model for autonomous driving. I wonder if the self driving companies are already using this architecture or something close to it.

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

#348

Post by Oras »

mehulashah wrote: post #277

Most of the folks on this topic are focused on Meta and Yann’s departure. But, I’m seeing something different. 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.

Every startup is an experiment; only 2% succeed.

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

#349

Post by jpadkins »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #262
sharmajai wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

None of Meta's revenue has anything to do with AI at all. (Other than GenAI slop in old people's feeds.) Meta is in the strange position of investing very heavily in multiple fields where they have no successful product: VR, hardware devices, and now AI. Ad revenue funds it all.

LLMs help ads efficiency a lot. policy labels, targeting, adaptive creatives, landing page evals, etc.

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

#350

Post by mehulashah »

Aurornis wrote: post #315
mehulashah wrote: post #277

Most of the folks on this topic are focused on Meta and Yann’s departure. But, I’m seeing something different. 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.

> Researchers are getting rewarded with VC money to try what remains a science experiment. That used to be a bad word I’ve worked for multiple startups and I’ve watched startup job boards most of my career. A lot of VC backed startups have a founder with a research background and are focused on providing out some hypothesis. I don’t see anything uncommon about this arrangement. If you live near a University that does…

Certainly research has made it into product with the help of the innovators that created the research. The dial is turned further here where the research ideas have yet to be tried and vetted. The research begins in the startup. Even in the dotcom era, the research prototypes were vetted in the conferences and journals before taking the risk to build production systems. This is no longer the case. The experiments have yet to be run.
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