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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'

#391

Post by scotty79 »

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.

Yeah, that's quite unusual. Buisness was always terrible at being innovative, always dared to take only the safest and most minute of bets and the progress of technology was always paid for by the taxpayers. Business usually stepped in only later, when technology was ready and did what it does best, opimize manufacturing and put it in the hands of as many consumers as possible rakink in billions.

I wonder what changed. Does AI look like a safe bet? Or does every other bet seem to not have any reasonable return?

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

#393

Post by claudiug »

fastball wrote: post #53
fxtentacle wrote: post #25

Working under LeCun but outside of Zuckerberg's sphere of influence sure sounds like a dream job.

Really? From where I'm standing LeCun is a pompous researcher who had early success in his career, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Have you read any of his papers from the last 20 years? 90% of his citations are to his own previous papers. From there, he missed the boat on LLMs and is now pretending everyone else is wrong so that he can feel better about it.

i prefer to work under a pile of shit than zuck.

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

#394

Post by echelon »

ACCount37 wrote: post #113
camillomiller wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs get results is quite the bold statement. If they get results, they should be getting adopted, and they should be making money. This is all built on hazy promises. If you had marketable results, you wouldn't have to hide 20+ billion dollars of debt financing into an obscure SPV. LLMs are the most baffling piece of tech. They are incredible, and yet marred by their non-deterministic hallucinatory nature, and bound…

LLMs get results, yes. They are getting adopted, and they are making money. Frontier models are all profitable . Inference is sold with a damn good margin, and the amounts of inference AI companies sell keeps rising. This necessitates putting more and more money into infrastructure. AI R&D is extremely expensive too, and this necessitates even more spending. A mistake I see people make over and over again is keeping…

> Frontier models are all profitable.

They generate revenue, but most companies are in the hole for the research capital outlay.

If open source models from China become popular, then the only thing that matters is distribution / moat.

Can these companies build distribution advantage and moats?

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

#396

Post by jfengel »

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.....

Those things all worked, and all of those products still exist in one form or another. It was a business question of who would provide it, not a technology question.

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

#397

Post by nradov »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #283
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.

Because when the recipe is open and public, the product's success depends on Distribution (which has been cornered by MS, Google, Apple). This is good for the ecosystem but not sure how those particular VCs will get exits.

Very few startup products depend on distribution by Microsoft / Google / Apple. You're really just talking about a limited set of mobile or desktop apps there. Everything else is wide open. Kailera Therapeutics isn't going to live or die based on what the tech giants do.

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

#398

Post by tshaddox »

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 doesn’t feel that new or surprising to me, although I suppose it depends what you consider the line between “science experiment” and “engineering R&D” to be.

Biotech has been a YC darling. Was Ginkgo Bioworks not doing science experiments?

Clean energy was a big YC fad roughly 15 years ago. Billions were invested towards scientific research into biofuels, solar, etc.

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

#399

Post by sidewndr46 »

ximeng wrote: post #386
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…

If Claude Code is Anthropic’s main focus why are they not responding to some of the most commented issues on their GitHub? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648 has people begging for feedback and saying they’re moving to OpenAI, has been open since July and there are similar issues with 100+ comments.

It's entirely possible they don't have the ability in house to resolve it. Based on the report this is a user interface issue. It could just be some strange setting they enabled somewhere. But it's also possible it's the result of some dependency 3 or 4 levels removed from their product. Even worse, it could be the result of interactions between multiple dependencies that are only apparent at runtime.

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

#400

Post by [deleted] »

tarsinge wrote: post #341
chaoz_ wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lang…

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