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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'

#461

Post by meekaaku »

sigbottle wrote: post #202
blutoot wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the types that want academic freedom in a cut-throat industry setup and conversely never fit into academia because their profiles and growth ambitions far exceed what an academic research lab can afford (barring some marquee names). It's an unfortunate paradox.

Maybe it's time for Bell Labs 2? I guess everyone is racing towards AGI in a few years or whatever so it's kind of impossible to cultivate that environment.

I am of the opinion that splitting AT&T and hence Bell Labs was a net negative for America and rest of the world.

We are yet to create lab as foundational as Bell Labs.

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

#462

Post by ghm2180 »

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.

Has someone done a survey to ask devs on how much they are getting done vs what their managers expect with AI? I've had conversations with multiple devs in big orgs telling me that Managers and dev's expectations are seriously out of sync. Basically its

Manager: Now you "have" AI, release 10 features instead of 1 in the next month.

Devs: Spending 50% more working hours to make AI code "work" and deliver 10.

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

#463

Post by IncreasePosts »

_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.

It helps when they hand you comically large sacks with dollar signs on them

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

#464

Post by SamPatt »

gdulli wrote: post #422
0_____0 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we define intelligence as problem solving ability, then AI makes _me_ more intelligent, and I'm willing to pay for that.

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

#465

Post by Keyframe »

benlivengood wrote: post #447
0_____0 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Energy is only ~10% of world GDP whereas AGI might be 25-75% and if paired with advanced robotics would be closer to 100%. Capital always chases the highest rate of return as well, and margins on energy production are tight. Margins on performing labor are huge.

AI does need a ton of energy to function, so far. So there's that.

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

#466

Post by HardwareLust »

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.

It's the world's biggest game of "let's throw shit at the wall and see what sticks."

They're trying desperately to find profit in what so far has been the biggest boondoggle of all time.

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

#467

Post by jonas21 »

ripe wrote: post #218
ACCount37 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This is an extraordinary claim and needs extraordinary proof. LLMs are raising lots of investor money, but that's a completely different thing from being profitable.

Dario Amodei from Anthropic has made the claim that if you looked at each model as a separate business, it would be profitable [1], i.e. each model brings in more revenue over its lifetime than the total of training + inference costs. It's only because you're simultaneously training the next generation of models, which are larger and more expensive to train, but aren't generating revenue yet, that the company as a whole loses money in a given year.

Now, it's not like he opened up Anthropic's books for an audit, so you don't necessarily have to trust him. But you do need to believe that either (a) what he is saying is roughly true or (b) he is making the sort of fraudulent statements that could get you sent to prison.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcqQ1ebBqkc&t=1014s

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

#468

Post by numpy-thagoras »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #146
natch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He im…

Isn't this idea demonstrably false due to the existence of various sensory disorders too? I have a disorder characterised by the brain failing to filter own its own sensory noise, my vision is full of analogue TV-like distortion and other artefacts. Sometimes when it's bad I can see my brain constructing an image in real time rather than this perception happening instantaneously, particularly when I'm out walking. A…

The default philosophical position for human biology and psychology is known as Representational Realism. That is, reality as we know it is mediated by changes and transformations made to sensory (and other) input data in a complex process, and is changed sufficiently to be something "different enough" from what we know to be actually real.

Direct Realism is the idea that reality is directly available to us and any intermediate transformations made by our brains is not enough to change the dial.

Direct Realism has long been refuted. There are a number of examples, e.g. the hot and cold bucket; the straw in a glass; rainbows and other epiphenomena, etc.

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

#469

Post by ximeng »

bcherny wrote: post #446
ximeng wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. We try hard to read through every issue, and respond to as many issues as possible. The challenge is we have hundreds of new issues each day, and even after Claude dedupes and triages them, practically we can’t get to all of them immediately. The specific issue you linked is related to the way Ink works, and the way terminals use ANSI escape codes to control rendering. When…

Thanks for the reply (and for Claude Code!). I've seen improvement on this particular issue already with the last major release, to the extent that it's not a day to day issue for me. I realise Github issues are not the easiest comms channel especially with 100s coming in a day, but occasional updates on some of the top 10 commented issues could perhaps be manageable and beneficial.

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

#470

Post by thefourthchime »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #285
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.

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…

You must not watch broadcast television (e.g American Football). Anthropic is doing a huge ad blitz, trying to get end customers to use their chatbot.
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