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Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

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Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#401

Post by SilverBirch »

echelon wrote: post #355
chriskanan wrote: post #284

I had lunch with Yann last August, about a week after Alex Wang became his "boss." I asked him how he felt about that, and at the time he told me he would give it a month or two and see how it goes, and then figure out if he should stay or find employment elsewhere. I told him he ought to just create his own company if he decides to leave Meta to chase his own dream, rather than work on the dream's of others. That sa…

You have to understand the strategy of all the other players: Build attention-grabbing, monetizable models that subsidize (at least in part) the run up to AGI. Nobody is trying to one-shot AGI. They're grinding and leveling up while (1) developing core competencies around every aspect of the problem domain and (2) winning users. I don't know if Meta is doing a good job of this, but Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are.…

There's two points here. The first is that a strategy of monetizing models to fund the goal of reaching AI is indistinguishable from just running a business selling LLM model access, you don't actually need to be trying to reach AGI you can just run an LLM company and that is probably what these companies are largely doing. The AGI talk is just a recruiting/marketing strategy.

Secondly, it's not clear that the current LLMs are a run up to AGI. That's what LeCun is betting - that the LLM labs are chasing a local maxima.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#402

Post by qsera »

mirekrusin wrote: post #383
lich_king wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Wason selection task is the classic example: most people fail a simple conditional reasoning problem unless it’s dressed up in familiar social context, like catching cheaters. I've never heard about the Wason selection task, looked it up, and could tell the right answer right away. But I can also tell you why: because I have some familiarity with formal logic and can, in your words, pattern-match the gotcha tha…

As they say, "think about how smart the average person is, then realize half the population is below that". There are far more haikus than opuses walking this planet. We keep benchmarking models against the best humans and the best human institutions - then when someone points out that swarms, branching, or scale could close the gap, we dismiss it as "cheating". But that framing smuggles in an assumption that intelli…

The question is not if these things are actually intelligent or not. The question is if these things will be useful without an endless supply of training data and continuous re-alignment using it..

And the questions "Are these things really intelligent" is just a proxy for that.

And we are interested in that question because that is necessary to justify the massive investment these things are getting now. It is quite easy to look at these things and conclude that it will continue to progress without any limit.

But that would be like looking at data compression at the time of its conception, and thinking that it is only a matter of time we can compress 100GB into 1KB..

We live in a time of scams that are obvious if you take a second look. If something that require much deeper scrutiny, then it is possible to generate a lot more larger bubble.

> and that moat is shrinking fast..

The point is that in reality it is not. It is just appearance. If you consider how these things work, then there is no justification of this conclusion.

I have said this elsewhere, but the problem of Hallucination itself along with the requirement of re-training, the smoking gun that these things are not intelligence in ways that would justify these massive investments.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#403

Post by qsera »

ghywertelling wrote: post #387
mirekrusin wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they say, "think about how smart the average person is, then realize half the population is below that". There are far more haikus than opuses walking this planet. We keep benchmarking models against the best humans and the best human institutions - then when someone points out that swarms, branching, or scale could close the gap, we dismiss it as "cheating". But that framing smuggles in an assumption that intelli…

The "God of the gaps" theory is a theological and philosophical viewpoint where gaps in scientific knowledge are cited as evidence for the existence and direct intervention of a divine creator. It asserts that phenomena currently unexplained by science—such as the origin of life or consciousness—are caused by God. We are doing inversion of God of gaps to "LLM of Gaps" where gaps in LLM capabilities are considered inh…

It is not actually the gaps in capability, and instead it arises from an understanding of how it works and an honest acknowledgement of how far it could go.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#404

Post by FartyMcFarter »

mihaitoth wrote: post #147

This couldn't have happened sooner, for 2 reasons. 1) the world has become a bit too focused on LLMs (although I agree that the benefits & new horizons that LLMs bring are real). We need research on other types of models to continue. 2) I almost wrote "Europe needs some aces". Although I'm European, my attitude is not at all that one of competition. This is not a card game. What Europe DOES need is an ATTRACTIVE WORK…

> What Europe DOES need is an ATTRACTIVE WORKPLACE, so that talent that is useful for AI can also find a place to work here, not only overseas!

There is DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic in London. Even after Brexit, London is still in Europe.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#405

Post by Razengan »

overfeed wrote: post #367
yellow_lead wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Apple has allowed Facebook, TikTok etc. to track users across devices AND device resets via the iCloud Keychain API.

When you log into FB on any account on any device, then install FB on a new device, or even after you erase the device, they know it's you even before you log in. Because the info is tied to your Apple iCloud account.

And there's no way for users to see or delete what data other companies have stored and linked to your Apple ID via that API.

It's been like this for at least 5 years and nobody seems to care.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#406

Post by eloisant »

andy12_ wrote: post #30
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #11

Justifiable. 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…

LeCun is a researcher.

From his point of view, there are not much research left on LLM. Sure we can still improve them a bit with engineering around, but he's more interested in basic research.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#407

Post by 10xDev »

Bombthecat wrote: post #313
10xDev wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it is text or an image, it is just bits for a computer. A token can represent anything.

Can a token represent concentration, will?

Those sound more like emergent properties then something you can engineer.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#408

Post by _giorgio_ »

LeCun has had every advantage imaginable — and the scoreboard remains empty.

He joined Facebook (now Meta) in December 2013. That's over 12 years of access to one of the largest AI labs in the world, near-unlimited compute, and some of the best researchers money can buy.

He introduced I-JEPA in 2023, nearly 3 years ago. It was supposed to represent a fundamental shift in how machines learn — moving beyond generative models toward a deeper, more structured world understanding.

And yet: I-JEPA hasn't decisively beaten existing models on any major benchmark. No Meta product uses JEPA as a core approach. The research community hasn't adopted it — the field keeps pushing on LLMs and diffusion models. There's been no "GPT moment" for JEPA, no single result that made its value obvious to everyone.

So the question becomes simple: how many years, how many resources, and how many failed proof-of-concepts does it take before we're allowed to judge whether an idea actually works?

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