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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'

#471

Post by behnamoh »

dboon wrote: post #456
bcherny wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s surprising to hear this get chalked up to “it’s the way our TUI library works”, while e.g. opencode is going to the lowest level and writing their own TUI backend. I get that we can’t expect everyone to reinvent the wheel, but it feels symptomatic of something that folks are willing to chalk up their issues as just being an unfortunate and unavoidable symptom of a library they use rather than seeming that unacce…

> CC is one of the best and most innovative pieces of software of the last decade...

Oh come on! Aider existed before it, and so did many other TUI AI agents. I'd say Rust and Elixir were more innovation than CC.

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

#472

Post by numpy-thagoras »

Gooblebrai wrote: post #175
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…

> humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal Is he advocating for philosophical idealism of the mind or does he has an alternate physicalist theory?

I don't think he actually understands direct realism, idealism, or representational realism as distinctions whatsoever.

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

#473

Post by whiplash451 »

xuancanh wrote: post #65
sebmellen wrote: post #2

Making LeCun report to Wang was the most boneheaded move imaginable. But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.

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…

It's very hard (and almost irreconcilable) to lead both Applied Research -- that optimizes for product/business outcomes -- and Fundamental Research -- that optimizes for novel ideas -- especially at the scale of Meta.

LeCun had chosen to focus on the latter. He can't be blamed for not having taken the second hat.

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

#474

Post by whiplash451 »

blutoot wrote: post #167
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…

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.

Meta has the financial oomph to run multiple Bell Labs within its organization.

Why they decided not to do that is kind of a puzzle.

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

#475

Post by startupsfail »

panarky wrote: post #460
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.

If a science experiment works and is transformational can be worth a trillion dollars, how much is it worth if it has a 5% chance of being transformational?

What if it is a 99% chance of being transformational and the results of that transformation are completely unpredictable?

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

#476

Post by numpy-thagoras »

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?

A world model is a persistent representation of the world (however compressed) that is available to an AI for accessing and compute. For example, a weather world model would likely include things like wind speed, surface temperature, various atmospheric layers, total precipitable water, etc. Now suppose we provide a real time live feed to an AI like an LLM, allowing the LLM to have constant, up to date weather knowledge that it loads into context for every new query. This LLM should have a leg up in predictive power.

Some world models can also be updated by their respective AI agents, e.g. "I, Mr. Bot, have moved the ice cream into the freezer from the car" (thereby updating the state of freezer and car, by transferring ice cream from one to the other, and making that the context for future interactions).

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

#477

Post by f33d5173 »

jonas21 wrote: post #467
ripe wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

He's speaking in a purely hypothetical sense. The title of the video even makes sure to note "in this example". If it turned this wasn't true of anthropic, it certainly wouldn't be fraud.

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

#478

Post by mattmaroon »

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 makes sense, it’s a simple expected value calculation.

There are trillions of labor dollars that can be replaced by software. The US alone has almost $12 trillion of labor annually.

If an AI company has a 10% shot of developing a product that can replace 10% of it, they are worth $120 billion in expected value. (These numbers are obviously just for illustration).

The unprecedented numbers are a simple function of the unprecedented market size. Nobody has ever had a chance of creating trillions of dollars of economic value in a handful of years before.

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

#479

Post by esalman »

ergocoder wrote: post #104
sebmellen wrote: post #2

Making LeCun report to Wang was the most boneheaded move imaginable. But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.

LeCun is great and smart, of course. But he had his chance. It didn't go that well. Now Zuck wants somebody else to try. Messi is the best footballer of our era. It doesn't mean he would play well in any team.

Messi would only play well in Barcelona. Lecunn can produce high quality research anywhere. It's not a great comparison.

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

#480

Post by reducesuffering »

Zufriedenheit wrote: post #151

It is the wet dream of a social media company to replace the pesky content creators that demand a share of ad revenue with an generative ai model, that pumps out a constant stream of engagement farming slop, so they can keep all the ad revenue for themselves. Creating a world model ai is a totally different matter, that requires long term commitment.

Not just social media, all media. Spotify will steer music towards AI generated freebies. And it will get so generically pop, that all your friends will like it, like people mostly enjoy pop now. And when your stubborn self still wants to listen to "handmade" music and discuss it with someone else who would still appreciate it, well, that's where your AI friend comes in.
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