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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'

#51

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

raverbashing wrote: post #12
tinco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.

Yeah honestly I'm with the LLM people here If you think LLMs are not the future then you need to come with something better If you have a theoretical idea that's great, but take to at least GPT2 level first before writing off LLMs Theoretical people love coming up with "better ideas" that fall flat or have hidden gotchas when they get to practical implementation As Linus says, "talk is cheap, show me the code".

Isn't that exactly why he's starting a new company?

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

#52

Post by whizzter »

raverbashing wrote: post #12
tinco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.

Yeah honestly I'm with the LLM people here If you think LLMs are not the future then you need to come with something better If you have a theoretical idea that's great, but take to at least GPT2 level first before writing off LLMs Theoretical people love coming up with "better ideas" that fall flat or have hidden gotchas when they get to practical implementation As Linus says, "talk is cheap, show me the code".

LLM's are probably always going to be the fundamental interface, the problem they solved was related to the flexibility of human languages allowing us to have decent mimikry's.

And while we've been able to approximate the world behind the words, it's just full of hallucinations because the AI's lack axiomatic systems beyond much manually constructed machinery.

You can probably expand the capabilties by attaching to the front-end but I suspect that Yann is seeing limits to this and wants to go back and build up from the back-end of world reasoning and then _among other things_ attach LLM's at the front-end (but maybe on equal terms with vision models that allows for seamless integration of LLM interfacing _combined_ with vision for proper autonomous systems).

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

#53

Post by fastball »

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.

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

#54

Post by muragekibicho »

gregjw wrote: post #33

Interesting he isn't just working with Feifei Li if he's really interested in 'world models'.

Exactly where my mind turned. It's interesting how the AI OG's (Feifei and Cunn) think world models are the way forward.

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

#55

Post by barrkel »

jll29 wrote: post #38
tinco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.

I politely disagree - it is exactly an industry researcher's purpose to do the risky things that may not work, simply because the rest of the corporation cannot take such risks but must walk on more well-trodden paths. Corporate R&D teams are there to absorb risk, innovate, disrupt, create new fields, not for doing small incremental improvements. "If we know it works, it's not research." (Albert Einstein) I also agre…

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 abstract over it, to chunk up, the details have an annoying way of making themselves visible again.

You can get purity in mathematical models, and in information systems, but those imperfectly model the world and continually need to be updated, refactored, and rewritten as they decay and diverge from reality.

These things are best used as tools by something similar to LLMs, models to be used, built and discarded as needed, but never a ground source of truth.

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

#57

Post by alex1138 »

tene80i wrote: post #35
alex1138 wrote: post #23

Change my mind, Facebook was never invented by Zuck's genius All he's been responsible for is making it worse

He definitely has horrible product instincts, but he also bought insta and whatsapp at what were, back then, eye-watering prices, and these were clearly massive successes in terms of killing off threats to the mothership. Everything since then, though…

I know but isn't "massive success" rubbing up against antitrust here? The condition was "Don't share data with Facebook"

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

#58

Post by whizzter »

ahartmetz wrote: post #31
1zael wrote: post #7

"These models aim to replicate human reasoning and understanding of the physical world, a project LeCun has said could take a decade to mature." What an insane time horizon to define success. I suppose he easily can raise enough capital for that kind of runway.

A pretty short time horizon for actual research. Interesting to see it combined with the SV/VC world, though.

I suspect he sees a lot of scattered pieces of fundamental research outside of LLM's that he thinks could be integrated for a core within a year, the 10 years is to temper investors (that he can buy leeway for with his record) and fine tune and work out the kinks when actually integrating everything that might not have some obvious issues.

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

#59

Post by lm28469 »

tedsanders wrote: post #36
consumer451 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain to me the non-$$ logic for one working towards AGI, aside from misanthropy? The only other thing I can imagine is not very charitable: intellectual greed. It can't just be that, can it? I genuinely don't understand. I would love to be educated.

I'm working toward AGI. I hope AGI can be used to automate work and make life easier for people.

How old are you?

That's what they've been selling us for the past 50 years and nothing has changed, all the productivity gain was pocketed by the elite

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

#60

Post by lolive »

DaSHacka wrote: post #20
lolive wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy has survived the AI winter. He can wait 10 years for yet another breakthrough. [but the market can’t] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

We're at most in an "AI Autumn" right now. The real Winter is yet to come.

Java Spring.

Google summer.

AI autumn.

Nuclear winter.

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