One wonders why this sort of research isn’t in academia but in startups instead.
Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
361–370 of 529 posts
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#362Am I going to finally get a robot to fold my clothes?
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#363Looks like they'll be hiring on in Montreal in addition to Paris (and NYC and Signapore): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ami I hope they grow that office like crazy. This would be really good for Canada. We have (or have had) the AI talent here (though maybe less so overall in Montreal than in Toronto/Waterloo and Vancouver and Edmonton). And I hope Carney is promoting the crap out of this and making it worth their while t…
Montreal and Paris means the europeans and French can move in and out when it comes to hiring. I really like how the world has interest in EU, Canada and Australia now that the west has become unstable for immigration.
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did. Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers.
> Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers. Speaking of returns - Apple absolutely fucked Meta ads with the privacy controls, which trashed ad performance, revenue and share price. Meta turned things around using AI, with Yann as the lead researcher. Are you willing to give him credit for that? Revenue is now greater than pre-Apple-data-lockdown
How much of Meta's increased revenue is attributed to AI? I think Meta "turned things around" by bypassing privacy controls [1].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/21/meta-allegedly-bypassed-apple...
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#365> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have a…
"and we didn't see anything" is not justified at all. Meta absolutely has (or at least had) a word class industry AI lab and has published a ton of great work and open source models (granted their LLM open source stuff failed to keep up with chinese models in 2024/2025 ; their other open source stuff for thins like segmentation don't get enough credit though). Yann's main role was Chief AI Scientist, not any sort of…
For instance, under Yann's direction Meta FAIR produced the ESM protein sequence model, which is less hyped than AlphaFold, but has been incredibly influential. They achieved great performance without using multiple alignments as an input/inductive bias. This is incredibly important for large classes of proteins where multiple alignments are pretty much noise.
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#366Justifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (ground…
I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…
If your model is poor, no amount of learning can fix it. If you don't think your model architecture is limited, you aren't looking hard enough.
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers. Speaking of returns - Apple absolutely fucked Meta ads with the privacy controls, which trashed ad performance, revenue and share price. Meta turned things around using AI, with Yann as the lead researcher. Are you willing to give him credit for that? Revenue is now greater than pre-Apple-data-lockdown
How much of Meta's increased revenue is attributed to AI? I think Meta "turned things around" by bypassing privacy controls [1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/21/meta-allegedly-bypassed-apple...
> I think Meta "turned things around" by bypassing privacy controls
Why would Apple be complicit on this for years?
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#368It's curious to me why we have no theory of intelligence. By which I mean an actual hard and verified theory, as in physics for gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. Intelligence is simply not well-understood at a mathematical level. Like medieval engineers, we rely so heavily on experimentation in AI. We have no idea how far away from the human level we actually are. Or how far above the human level we can g…
Who is more intelligent: a twenty-something influencer making money from her bedroom, or a grad student barely making ends meet?
Who is more intelligent: a politician, or a high school teacher?
What is intelligence, anyway?
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#369Justifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (ground…
I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…
yes those are bottlenecks that world models don't solve. but the promise of world models is, unlike LLMs, they might be able to learn things about the world that humans haven't written. For example, we still don't fully know how insects fly. A world model could be trained on thousands of videos of insects and make a novel observation about insect trajectories. The premise is that despite being here for millenia, humans have only observed a tiny fraction of the world.
So I do buy his idea. But I disagree that you need world models to get to human level capabilities. IMO there's no fundamental reason why models can't develop human understanding based on the known human observations.
Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
#370Yann LeCun seeks $5B+ valuation for world model startup AMI (Amilabs). He has hired LeBrun to the helm as CEO. AMI has also hired LeFunde as CFO and LeTune as head of post-training. They’re also considering hiring LeMune as Head of Growth and LePrune to lead inference efficiency. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-confirms-his-ne...
It almost sound as if an LLM thought this up!