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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'

#491

Post by red2awn »

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'd argue SSI and Thinking Machines Lab seem to that environment you are thinking about. Industry labs that focuses on research without immediate product requirement.

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

#492

Post by tcdent »

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…

As someone who's used Claude Code daily since the day it was released, the sentiment back then (sooo many months ago) was that the Agent CI coding TUIs were kind of experimental proof-of-concepts. We have seen them be incredibly effective and the CC team has continued to add features.

Tech debt isn't something that even experienced large teams are immune to. I'm not a huge TypeScript fan, so seeing their choice to run their app on Node to me felt like a trade-off between development speed with the experience that the team had and at the expense of long-term growth and performance. I regularly experience pretty intense flickering and rendering issues and high CPU usage and even crashes but that doesn't stop me from finding the product incredibly useful.

Developing good software especially in a format that is relatively revolutionary takes time to get right and I'm sure whatever efforts they have internally to push forward a refactor will be worth it. But, just like in any software development, refactors are prone to timeline slips and scope creep. A company having tons of money doesn't change the nature of problem-solving in software development.

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

#493

Post by BeetleB »

butlike wrote: post #431
esafak wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, successfully many times?

It's not very good

2.5 Pro is still my favorite model for most things. I use Open WebUI and usually route my queries to multiple models simultaneously. It's rare for something to give a better response than 2.5 Pro.

It's just ... slow.

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

#494

Post by John7878781 »

Oras wrote: post #353
qwertox wrote: post #240

It would have been just as interesting to read that he moved over to Google, where the real brains and resources are located at. Meta is now just competing against giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, plus all the new Chinese companies; I see no real chance for them to offer a popular chat model, but rather to market their AI as a bundled product for companies which want to advertise, where the images and videos…

> moved over to Google, where the real brains and resources are located at Brains yes, outcome? I doubt it. Have you used Gemini?

Gemini 2.5 Pro works great for me... In fact, I would go as far to say that it consistently performs the best compared to competition.

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

#495

Post by AdamN »

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.

I think that's a good thing and VC getting back to it's roots. I'm glad that scientists doing AI are getting big money and don't know exactly what the product will be rather than some business person with a slick deck and hockey stick charts.

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

#496

Post by gdulli »

SamPatt wrote: post #464
gdulli wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The calculator didn't make people better at math, it led to a society of people who can't do math without a calculator. And as a result math doesn't get done in many casual situations where it would be helpful, but people don't go to the trouble of pulling out the calculator.

So it's made it easier for people to be taken advantage of at the grocery store etc.

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

#497

Post by aswanson »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #463
_vqpz wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder if the 100 million dollar guys got a signing bonus like athletes. Just take 10 mill and chuck up deuces.

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

#498

Post by yalogin »

anonymousDan wrote: post #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?

Even if it’s Meta, they don’t want to antagonize LeCun. Also they all know it’s a small circle of people that create value. I will not be surprised if meta itself invests in his company and get a share.

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

#499

Post by bigyabai »

numpy-thagoras wrote: post #476
sebmellen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knowle…

If your "world model" only models a small portion of the world, I think the more appropriate label is a time-series model. Once you truncate correlated data, the model you're left with isn't very worldly at all.

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

#500

Post by Vegenoid »

sgt wrote: post #255
curiouscube wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One theory of how humans work is the so called predictive coding approach. Basically the theory assumes that human brains work similar to a kalman filter, that is, we have an internal model of the world that does a prediction of the world and then checks if the prediction is congruent with the observed changes in reality. Learning then comes down to minimizing the error between this internal model and the actual obse…

So... that seems like possible path towards AGI. Doesn't it?

Only if you also provide it with a way for it to richly interact with the world (i.e. an embodiment). Otherwise, how do you train it? How does a world model verify the correctness of its model in novel situations?
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