Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

The continual learning we get may be a bit hamfisted, and not fit into a neat architecture, but I think we could actually see it work at scale in the next few years. Whereas new techniques like what Yann Lecun have demonstrated still live heavily in the realm of research. Cool, but not useful yet.

Fine tuning is also not so limited as you suggest. For one, we don’t need to fine tune the same model over and over, you can just start with a frontier model each time. And two, modern models are much better at generating synthetic data or environments for RL. This could definitely work, but it might require a lot of work in data collection and curation, and the ROI is not clear. But if large companies continue to allocate more and more resources to AI in the next few years, I could see this happening.

OpenAI already has a custom model service, and labs have stated they already have custom models built for the military (although how custom those models are is unclear). It doesn’t seem like a huge leap to also fine-tune models over a companies internal codebases and tooling. Especially for large companies like Google, Amazon, or Stripe that employ tens of thousands of software engineers.

We do what we do, not because of motivation, but because that what we've evolved to do.

Feeling really comes after the fact, or independent of it, when we're introspecting on what we've already done (courtesy of evolution), and how we feel about that, or how can we explain it!

There is tons of evidence that this is the way our brains work - we do things "because" then (if asked, or if thinking about it) concoct post-hoc explanations of why we did it. An example of this is split brain patients, where one half of the brain happily explains why the other half did what it did, despite there being no connection between the two (nor any subjective feeling by the patient that there is anything amiss with their brain)!

But sure, we have feelings, closely related to qualia you could say. It does "feel like something" to be depressed, or excited, or inspired, or whatever. I don't see any big mystery to this - our brain is able to self-observe and not surprisingly able to detect it's own varied patterns of operation (including ones induced by brain chemicals, natural or otherwise).

I presume where you may want to go with this is "but why does it feel like anything? why is there any subjective experience at all (and would a machine have it too)?", and I think the answer is that this is just an emergent property of having a cognitive apparatus capable of self-observation. We can already see the glimmerings of this in LLMs, maybe a bad example since their thoughts are derived from humans, but nonetheless LLMs self-report as if they are conscious, and have existential discussions about it on Moltbook. It's hard to imagine (to bring this back on topic) that LeCun's animal intelligence, basically something LLM-like that is trained from scratch (no baked in human knowledge) wouldn't report the exact same thing.

I think the way this works is something like this:

1) Our body / brain will detect that we're low on energy and release neurotransmitters indicating this

2) Our body may also provide physical indications of hunger based on empty stomach

3) These hunger-detection (or i-should-eat) signals may directly trigger behavior patterns related to finding food. In a primitive animal or baby this may be direct (baby starts crying, mom provides food), and as a human adult it may include triggering past patterns of food finding (go to the kitchen) when we felt like this before

4) In parallel with 3), the evolutionally newer part of our brain will eventually recognize what's going on, and that we're feeling hungry, and if we haven't already done anything about it then we might make a more deliberate plan to do something about it "i'm hungry, should get some lunch, what will i have .."

So, I think it's a combination of 3) and 4).

I'd guess there are probably also some animals, maybe some humans, that feed instinctively, more or less all the time, and perhaps have more of an "i'm full, off switch" than an "i'm hungry, on switch".

I don't know - this is obviously partly guess work. Certainly if you ask someone in the kitchen grabbing a snack why they are doing it they will provide a post-hoc explanation of "i'm feeling hungry", even if the "decision" to do it was subconscious.

That doesn’t make them invalid. Who takes IQ tests over and over?