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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'

#561

Post by WalterSear »

baxtr wrote: post #343
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 personally see this as a positive trend. VC in its earliest form was concerned with experiments that had high technology risk. I am thinking of companies like Genentech and scientists like biochemist Herbert Boyer, who had pioneered recombinant DNA technology. After that, VC had become more like PE, investing in stuff that was working already but needed money to scale.

This isn't that.

This is VCs FOMOing as global-economy-threatening levels of leverage are being bet on an AI transformation that, by even the most optimistic estimates, cannot achieve a tiny portion of the required ROI in the required time.

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

#562

Post by pksebben »

pksebben wrote: post #558
xnx wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From a certain angle, this is the market correcting towards the abstraction. Between inflation, fiscal capture, and the inane plethora of ridiculous financial vehicles that are used to move capital around these days, the argument could be made that the money was already funny. This is just the drop of the final veil, saying "well it's not like these numbers mean anything anymore. I do have enough yachts. Fuck it, see…

edit: Is LeCun wearing those godawful meta-camera-raybans? Am I tripping?

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

#564

Post by mrguyorama »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #241
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.

Well, AGI could accelerate scientific and medical discovery, saving lives and impacting billions of people positively. The potential downside is admittedly severe.

Would AGI actually be better than just giving all these dollars to various rote and boring sciences?

Bioscience is the next real revolution IMO. Figuring out our bodies as systems and how to program them will lead to a change bigger than information technology.

But what we need for that is not AGI. Bioscience suffers from a total lack of data. We only mapped the human genome a couple decades ago, and that's overselling it. We are currently in the process of slowly mapping out many proteins and receptors and interactions in the body.

We finally have the tooling to do that. We finally have the understanding to do that. What is limiting us right now is mostly the amount of graduate students being paid to laboriously analyze those proteins and what they interact with and other data points.

Once we have enough of that data, we can approach big ideas and other extremely beneficial models.

Right now we are in the calm before the storm. We are mid-1800s physics, just collecting the data necessary to discover and quantify models of electromagnetic energy and fields, the modeling of which is what directly lead to the information and then computer revolution. Most advancements of the 20th century were about utilizing those models to master the electromagnetic field. Similar data was how we figured out the nuclear forces.

We should be funding the mapping of the human biological system. We should be gathering the data required interact with our bodies.

No amount of "self improving superintelligent AGI" can actually overcome the whole "There's no data" problem. If we had a magical AGI in 1750, it would not have been able to produce Maxwell's equations.

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

#565

Post by mrguyorama »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #306
lm28469 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here's my prediction : The rapid progress of AI will make money as an accounting practice irrelevant. Take the concept of "Future is already here but unevenly distributed." When we will have true abundance, what the elites will target is the convex hull of progress, they want to be in control of leading edge / leading wavefront and its direction and who has access to resources and decision making. In such a scenario…

>When we will have true abundance, what the elites will target is the convex hull of progress

We have abundance. The elite took it all.

Every single dollar gained from increased productivity over the past 50 years has been given to them, by changes in tax structures primarily, and their current claim is that actually we need to give them more.

Because that's all they know. More. A bigger slice of the pie. They demonstrably do not want to make the pie bigger.

Making the whole pie bigger dilutes their control and power over resources. They'd rather just take more of the current pie.

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

#566

Post by Zanfa »

gdulli wrote: post #496
SamPatt wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people are equally bad at math with or without a calculator. The problem for the average person isn’t that they can’t add two numbers, it’s that they can’t tell which numbers they should be adding in the first place.

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

#567

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

astrange wrote: post #434
hbarka wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LeCun truly believes the future is in world models. He’s not alone. Good for him to now be in the position he’s always wanted and hopefully prove out what he constantly talks about.

He seems stuck in the GOFAI development philosophy where they just decide humans have something called a "world model" because they said so, and then decide that if they just develop some random thing and call it a "world model" it'll create intelligence because it has the same name as the thing they made up. And of course it doesn't work. Humans don't have world models. There's no such thing as a world model!

I don't think the focus is really on world models, rather than on animal intelligence based around predicting the real world, but to predict it you need to model it in some sense.

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

#568

Post by stocksinsmocks »

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 thought that was Google. Regulators pretend not to notice their monopoly, they probably get large government contracts for social engineering and surveillance laundered through advertising, and the “don’t be evil” part is they make some open source contributions

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

#569

Post by mrguyorama »

consumer451 wrote: post #41
tedsanders wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who’s gonna pay for that inference? It’s going to take money, what if your AGI has some tax policy ideas that are different from the inference owners? Why would they let that AGI out into the wild? Let’s say you create AGI. How long will it take for society to recover? How long will it take for people of a certain tax ideology to finally say oh OK, UBI maybe? The last part is my main question. How long do you think i…

>sama gets a lot of shit, but I have to admit at least he used to work on the UBI problem, orb and all.

The Orb was never ever ever meant to ever fix anything about UBI or even help it happen.

It was always about creating a hyped enough cryptocoin he could use as an ATM to fund himself and other things. That's what all these assholes got into crypto for, like, demonstrably. It was always about taking investment from fools who could not punish you for screwing them over, and then taking your bag and going home to play.

The orb was a sales and marketing gimmick. There's nothing it could do that couldn't be done by commodity fingerprint scanners.

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

#570

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #13
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.

Unless I've missed a few updates, much of the JEPA stuff didn't really bear a lot of fruit in the end.

I don't think he's given up on it.

How many decades did it take for neural nets to take off?

The reason we're even talking about LeCun today is because he was early in seeing the promise of neural nets and stuck with it through the whole AI winter when most people thought it was a waste of time.

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