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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'

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain to me the non-$$ logic for one working towards AGI, aside from misanthropy? The only other thing I can imagine is not very charitable: intellectual greed. It can't just be that, can it? I genuinely don't understand. I would love to be educated.

I'm working toward AGI. I hope AGI can be used to automate work and make life easier for people.

Who’s gonna pay for that inference?

It’s going to take money, what if your AGI has some tax policy ideas that are different from the inference owners?

Why would they let that AGI out into the wild?

Let’s say you create AGI. How long will it take for society to recover? How long will it take for people of a certain tax ideology to finally say oh OK, UBI maybe?

The last part is my main question. How long do you think it would take our civilization to recover from the introduction of AGI?

Edit: sama gets a lot of shit, but I have to admit at least he used to work on the UBI problem, orb and all. However, those days seem very long gone from the outside, at least.

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

#42
post #7

"These models aim to replicate human reasoning and understanding of the physical world, a project LeCun has said could take a decade to mature." What an insane time horizon to define success. I suppose he easily can raise enough capital for that kind of runway.

Zuck is a business guy, understandable that this isn't going to fly with him

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

#43

Change my mind, Facebook was never invented by Zuck's genius All he's been responsible for is making it worse

Almost every company in Facebook's position in 2005 would have disappeared into irrelevance by now.

Somehow it's one of the most valuable businesses in the world instead.

I don't know him, but, if not him, who else would be responsible for that?

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

#44
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Sure, if you only consider the model they have no object permanence. However you can just put your model in a loop, and feed the previous frame into the next frame. This is what LLM agent engineers do with their context histories, and it's probably also what the diffusion engineers do with their video models.

Messing with the logic in the loop and combining models has an enormous potential, but it's more engineering than researching, and it's just not the sort of work that LeCun is interested in. I think the conflict lies there, that Facebook is an engineering company, and a possible future of AI lies in AI engineering rather than AI research.

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

#45
post #27

What the hell does Mark see in Wang? Wang was born into a family whose parents got Chinese government scholarships to study abroad but secretly stayed in the US, and then the guy turns super anti-China. From any angle, this dude just doesn't seem reliable at all.

> Wang was born into a family whose parents got Chinese government scholarships to study abroad but secretly stayed in the US, and then the guy turns super anti-China. All I'm hearing is he's a smart guy from a smart family?

All I'm hearing is unreliable grifter from a family of unreliable grifters.

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

#46
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 thoroughly disagree, I believe world models will be critical in some aspect for text generation too. A predictive world model you can help to validate your token prediction. Take a look at the Code World Model for example.

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

#47
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I agree with your point, “Superintelligence” is a far cry from what Meta will end up delivering with Wang in charge. I suppose that, at the end of the day, it’s all marketing. What else should we expect from an ads company :?

The Meta Super-Intelligence can dwell in the Metaverse with the 23 other active users there.

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

#48
post #38
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> it is exactly a researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work

Maybe at university, but not at a trillion dollar company. That job as chief scientist is leading risky things that will work to please the shareholders.

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

#49
post #29

Zuck is definitely an idiot and MSL is an expensive joke, but LeCun hasn’t been relevant in a decade at this point. No doubt his pitch deck will be the same garbage slides he’s been peddling in every talk since the 2010’s.

why do you say it is garbage ? I watched some of its videos on YT and it looks interesting. I can't judge if it's good or really good, but that didn't sound like garbage at all.
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