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

I see a lot of criticism of LeCun and his views on LLMs as well as his inability to "deliver" products. I don't think that's what he cares about at all. His prominence led to him being picked by Meta. It was a chance to get massive resources that he couldn't get at NYU and the chance to work with smart people outside academia. The pay probably didn't hurt either. In return, Meta became a magnet for smart ML researchers and engineers. If I permit myself to speculate about his thoughts when he took the job, he had no intention of committing to product timelines and generating revenue. Now that Zuckerberg has clearly committed to something he like i.e. building a new product line and expanding the business, it was only a matter of time before LeCun would feel left out and under-resourced.

Interestingly, Yoshua Bengio is the only one who hasn't given into industry even though he could easily raise a lot of money.

I feel like LeCun has been plainly wrong about LLMs. He has been insisting that the stochastic nature of sampling tokens causes a non-zero hallucination property for any given next token such that as output length increases, this will inevitably converge towards garbage.

The reality is that while LLMs can make mistakes mid-output, those interim mistakes don't necessarily detract from the model's final output. We see a version of this all the time with agents as they make tactical mistakes but quickly backtrack and ultimately solve the root problem.

It really felt like LeCun was willing to die on this hill. He continued to argue about really pedantic things like the importance researchers, etc.

I'm glad he's gone and hopeful Meta can actually deliver real AI products for their users with better leadership.

A few people mentioned Meta burning through people like LeCun, Carmack and Luckey. We give a lot of credit to individuals in our society. At the same time, there's a frequent pattern of very successful people changing fields, organizations or general environments and suddenly looking very ordinary. In a way, this is a very strong argument to let people settle into a place they can be happiest in. A few examples:

* This is seen very often in Formula One. Schumacher when he went from Ferrari to Mercedes (after a short sabbatical), Vettel from Red Bull to Ferrari, Raikkonen from Lotus to Ferrari (his second stint), Hamilton from Mercedes to Ferrari, Perez at McLaren. There's a lot of Ferrari here so maybe that's the confounding factor.

* This also happens when physicists changed fields. They generally can't replicate their earlier success. Dirac, Feynman, Schwinger, Einstein all went through a transition like this. One explanation is that their early success was precisely so unusual (for anyone) that it would be hard to replicate in general.

* In my experience, this happens at companies too. Whenever we hired a "rockstar" from another company, they would generally struggle (across multiple companies I have been at). This could partly be a result of sabotage from a few vested interests at the new company. But often, it's hard to adjust to a new environment in a short amount of time.

The converse also happens. Sometimes a person considered ordinary goes to a different environment and flourishes. Palmer Luckey has been very successful at Anduril. Stephen Smale was almost failing out of his math PhD program but suddenly started flourishing in his third year IIRC and eventually got a fields medal. Ed Witten experimented with economics, history, linguistics, applied math before switching to physics in his second year and suddenly started making rapid progress.

This is not a very rigorous observation and I am missing many confounding factors.

I am a big fan of using LLMs although in my own limited way. I don't work at Meta and don't feel strongly about him leaving or staying there.

It's possible that he will turn out to be correct in the long run. From his viewpoint, the primary goal is research and any usefulness of intermediate advances is maybe (speculating) "beneath him". If this is the case, I completely understand why a corporation would want to eject him. LeCun probably sees the pretty amazing developments since ChatGPT first came out as incremental hacks. I am neutral about this aspect too. Maybe they are but the hacks have been useful to me.

Eventually this feels like the correction of a real misalignment between LeCun/FAIR and Meta. Hopefully now, they can both focus on what they are good at. I must admit that I have great sympathy for open-ended research but industry has always been fickle about it. That's where the government and universities are supposed to play a key role.

Matt Levine never disappoints.