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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'

#421

Post by modeless »

sebmellen wrote: post #30
numpy-thagoras wrote: post #15

Good. The world model is absolutely the right play in my opinion. AI Agents like LLMs make great use of pre-computed information. Providing a comprehensive but efficient world model (one where more detail is available wherever one is paying more attention given a specific task) will definitely eke out new autonomous agents. Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI. I wish…

Can you explain this “world model” concept to me? How do you actually interface with a model like this?

The best world model research I know of today is Dreamer 4: https://danijar.com/project/dreamer4/. Here is an interesting interview with the author: https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/danijar-hafner-on-dreamer-v4

Training on 2,500 hours of prerecorded video of people playing Minecraft, they produce a neural net world model of Minecraft. It is basically a learned Minecraft simulator. You can actually play Minecraft in it, in real time.

They then train a neural net agent to play Minecraft and achieve specific goals all the way up to obtaining diamonds. But the agent never plays the real game of Minecraft during training. It only plays in the world model. The agent is trained in its own imagination. Of course this is why it is called Dreamer.

The advantage of this is that once you have a world model, no extra real data is required to train agents. The only input to the system is a relatively small dataset of prerecorded video of people playing Minecraft, and the output is an agent that can achieve specific goals in the world. Traditionally this would require many orders of magnitude more real data to achieve, and the real data would need to be focused on the specific goals you want the agent to achieve. World models are a great way to cheaply amplify a small amount of undifferentiated real data into a large amount of goal-directed synthetic data.

Now, Minecraft itself is already a world model that is cheap to run, so a learned world model of Minecraft may not seem that useful. Minecraft is just a testbed. World models are very appealing for domains where it is expensive to gather real data, like robotics. I recommend listening to the interview above if you want to know more.

World models can also be useful in and of themselves, as games that you can play, or to generate videos. But I think their most important application will be in training agents.

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

#422

Post by gdulli »

0_____0 wrote: post #370
gdulli wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a "science experiment" has the chance to displace most labor then whoever's successful at the experiment wins the economy, period. There's nothing weird or surprising about the logic of them obsessively chasing it. They all have to, it's a prisoner's dilemma.

Fusion power has the chance to displace most power generation, and whoever is successful at the experiment wins the energy economy, period. However given the long timelines, high cost of research, and the unanswered technical questions around materials that can withstand neutron flux, the total 2024 investment into fusion is only around $10B, versus AI's 250+B. Why are these so different?

People are unsophisticated and see how convincing LLM output looks on the surface. They think it's already intelligent, or that intelligence is just around the corner. Or that its ability to displace labor, if not intelligence, is imminent.

If consumption of slop turns out to be a novelty that goes away and enough time goes by without a leap to truly useful intelligence, the AI investment will go down.

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

#424

Post by pirates »

_vqpz wrote: post #369
renegade-otter wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of them left in the first days on the job. I guess they saw what they were going to work on and peaced out. No one wants to work on AI slop and mental abuse of children on social media.

I don't understand how an intelligent person could accept a job offer from Facebook in 2025 and not understand what company they just agreed to work for.

Those people are intelligent, they’re just selfish and have no qualms over making money off the repugnant crap they’re doing.

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

#425

Post by fauigerzigerk »

pton_xd wrote: post #352
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Knowledge models, like ontologies, always seem suspect to me; like they promise a schema for crisp binary facts, when the world is full of probabilistic and fuzzy information loosely categorized by fallible humans based on an ever slowly shifting social consensus. I don't disagree that the world is full of fuzziness. But the problem I have with this portrayal is that formal models are often normative rather than ana…

> People may well have a fuzzy idea of how their credit card works, but how it really works is formally defined by financial institutions. > Our probabilistic, fuzzy concepts are often simply a misconception. How eg a credit card works today is defined by financial institutions. How it might work tomorrow is defined by politics, incentives, and human action. It's not clear how to model those with formal language. I t…

To some degree I think that our widely used formal languages may just be insufficient and could be improved to better describe change.

But ultimately I agree with you that this entire societal process is just categorically different. It's simply not a description or definition of something, and therefore the question of how formal it can be doesn't really make sense.

Formalisms are tools for a specific but limited purpose. I think we need those tools. Trying to replace them with something fuzzy makes no sense to me either.

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

#426

Post by [deleted] »

rob_c wrote: post #134
jack_tripper wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They knew what Yann LeCun was when they hired him. Yes but he was hired in the ZIRP era where all SV companies were hiring every opinionated academic and giving them free reign and unlimited money to burn in the hopes that maybe they'll create the next big thing for them eventually. These are very different economic times right now, after the FED infinite money glitch has been patched out, so now people do need to a…

so your message is to short OpenAI before it implodes and gets absorbed into Cortana or equivalent ;)

[deleted]

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

#427

Post by granitepail »

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.

His JEPA family of models is a genuine step forward for SSL. Not the only approach, but a very insightful one. You’re very dismissive of his work.

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

#428

Post by bwfan123 »

balamatom wrote: post #171
barrkel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge models, like ontologies, always seem suspect to me; like they promise a schema for crisp binary facts, when the world is full of probabilistic and fuzzy information loosely categorized by fallible humans based on an ever slowly shifting social consensus. Everything from the sorites paradox to leaky abstractions; everything real defies precise definition when you look closely at it, and when you try to abstr…

I have vague notions of there being an entire hidden philosophical/political battlefield (massacre?) behind the whole "are knowledge models/ontologies a realistic goal" debate. Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable: how definite of a thing is "the world", how knowable is it, what is even knowledge... and then back through the more pragmatic: by whom is it know…

Nice commentary and I enjoyed the poetic turn of phrase. I had to respond to it with my own thoughts if only to bookmark it for myself.

> how many people are continually ready to mistake language for thought

This is a fundamental illusion - where, rote memory and names and words get mistaken for understanding. This was wonderfully illustrated here [1]. Few really grok what understanding actually is. This is an unfortunate by-product of our education system.

> Are they all P-zombies or just obedience-conditioned into emulating ones?!?!?

Brilliant way to state the fundamental human condition. ie, we are all zombies conditioned to imitate rather than understand. Social media amplifies the zombification, and now LLMs do that too.

> Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable

This is the fundamental tension between operationalized meaning and imagination. A grokking soul gathers mists from the cosmic chaos and creates meaning and operationalizes it for its own benefit and then continually adapts it.

> it's amazing if sad that they cracked it by more data and not by more model

I was speaking to experts in the sciences (chemistry). They were shocked that the underlying architecture is brute force. They expected a compact information-compressed theory which is able to model independent of data. The problem with brute-force approaches are that they dont scale, and dont capture the essences which are embodied in theories.

> The physical limits of human language as information processing device have been hit at some point in the XX century

2000 years back when humans realized that formalism was needed to operationalize meaning, and natural language was too vague to capture and communicate it. Because the world model that natural language captures encompasses "everything" whereas for making it "useful" requires to limit it via formalism.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483976

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

#429

Post by snapcaster »

tonii141 wrote: post #254
ACCount37 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My man, you're literally moving all the goalposts as we speak. It's not just "long context" - you demand "infinite context" and "any length" now. Even humans don't have that. "No tools" is no longer enough - what, do you demand "no prompts" now too? Having LLMs decompose tasks and prompt each other the way humans do is suddenly a no-no?

I’m not demanding anything, I’m pointing out that performance tends to degrade as context scales, which follows from current LLM architectures as autoregressive models. In that sense, Yann was right.

Not sure if you're just someone who doesn't want to ever lose an argument or you're actually coping this hard

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

#430

Post by astrange »

sharmajai wrote: post #196
xuancanh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In industry research, someone in a chief position like LeCun should know how to balance long-term research with short-term projects. However, for whatever reason, he consistently shows hostility toward LLMs and engineering projects, even though Llama and PyTorch are two of the most influential projects from Meta AI. His attitude doesn’t really match what is expected from a Chief position at a product company like Fac…

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

Apple doesn't have an "R&D wing". It's a bad idea to split your company into the cool part and the boring part.
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