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

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481–490 of 680 posts

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

#481

I really hope he returns to Europe for his new startup.

He probably wants it to be successful, so that would be a foolish move

Some of the best AI researchers and labs have been from the EU (DeepMind, Alan Turing Institute, Mistral, et al.). We in the US have mature capital markets and stupid easy access to capital, of course, but EU still punches well above its weight when it comes to deep, fundamental AI research.

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

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is 65, and certainly rich enough to retire many times over. He's not doing this to scam money out of VCs. He wants to prove his ideas work.

So he's not using his own money, and he has enough personal wealth that there is no impact to him if the company fails. It's just another rich guy enjoying his toys. Good on him, I hope he has fun, but the responsibility for failure will be held by his employees, not him.

LeCun's net worth is estimated between 5-10 million.

Just for payroll of 10 AI researchers at 300k/yr would cost over $3 million per year. And his wealth probably isn't fully liquid. Given payroll + compute he would be bankrupt in a year. Of course he's not using just his own money.

However, I expect he will be a major investor. Most founders prefer to maintain some control.

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

#483

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…

>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.

that's not how profits work. Companies don't get paid for the value they create but for the value they can capture, otherwise the ffmpeg people would already be trillionaires.

If you have a dozen companies making the same general purpose technology, not product, your only hope is being able to slap ads on top of it, which is why they're so keen on targeting consumers rather than trying to automate jobs.

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

#484

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.

This looks more like a return to form than anything.

The first ventures were funding voyages to a New World thousands of miles away, essentially a different planet as far as the people then were concerned.

Venture capital for a new B2B application is playing it safe as far as risk capital goes

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

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta hiring researchers en masse at $100m+ pay packages is fairly new, as of this summer. I don't know if that's indicative of the market as a whole though. Zuck just seems really gutted they fell behind with Llama 4.

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.

> No one wants to work on AI slop and mental abuse of children on social media.

If this was true, we wouldn't have AI slop and mental abuse of children. Since we do, we know your comment is just flat out incorrect.

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

#486

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.

> This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen.

The phenomenon you're seeing is well described here: "The Perfect AI Startup" (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-09-29/the...)

“It was the most absurd pitch meeting,” one investor who met with Murati said. “She was like, ‘So we’re doing an AI company with the best AI people, but we can’t answer any questions.’”

Despite that vagueness, Murati raised $2 billion in funding...

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

#487
post #456

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…

We started by using Ink, and at this point it’s our own framework due to the number of changes we’ve made to it over the months. Terminal rendering is hard, and it’s less that we haven’t modified the renderer, and more that there is this pretty fundamental tradeoff with terminal rendering that we have been navigating.

Other terminal apps make different tradeoffs: for example Vim virtualizes scrolling, which has tradeoffs like the scroll physics feeling non-native and lines getting fully clipped. Other apps do what Claude Code does but don’t re-render scrollback, which avoids flickering but means the UI is often garbled if you scroll up.

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

#488

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…

That issue is the fourth most-reacted issue, and third most open issue. And the two things above it are feature requests. It seems like you should at the very least have someone pop in to say "working on it" if that's what you're doing, instead of letting it sit there for 4 months?

Fair feedback — commented https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3648#issuec...

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

#489
I'm interested to understand how this works from an IP perspective. This guy is still employed by Meta but is actively fundraising for a new competing startup. Presumably he will have negotiated that Meta forfeits all rights to anything related to his new business? Would be interesting to hear of people's experience/advice for doing this. Or are there some legal entitlements he can avail of?

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

#490

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.

Is he wrong though? Do you really think LLMs are the path to AGI?
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