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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'

#591

Post by ActorNightly »

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".

>If you think LLMs are not the future then you need to come with something better

The problem isn't LLMS, the problem is that everyone is trying to build bigger/better llms or manually code agents around LLMs. Meanwhile, projects like Mu Zero are forgotten, despite being vastly more important for things like self driving.

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

#592

Post by intalentive »

curiouscube wrote: post #210
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?

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…

Good summary. For those interested in more details, check out the book Surfing Uncertainty.

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

#593

Post by aryonoco »

ambicapter wrote: post #385
aryonoco wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to say this about Amazon all the time. Remember how Amazon basically didn’t turn any real profits for 2 decades? The joke was that Amazon was a charitable organisation being funded by Wall Street for the benefit of human kind. That didn’t last. People in the know knew that once you have a billion users and insane revenue and market power and have basically bought or driven out of business most of your com…

So every company that doesn't turn any profits is actually Amazon in disguise?

If you’ve got nearly a billion users, and are multiplying your revenue on an annual basis, then yes. You’re effectively showing that you’re in hyper growth trajectory.

Hyper growth is expensive because it’s usually capital intensive. The trick is, once that growth phase is over, can you then start milking your customers while keeping a lid on costs? Not everyone can, but Amazon did, and most investors think OpenAI and Anthropic can as well.

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

#594

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

astrange wrote: post #574
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO the issue is that animals can't have a specific "world model" system, because if you create a model ahead of time you will mostly waste energy because most of the model is not used. And animals' main concern is energy conservation, so they must be doing something else.

There are many factors playing into "survival of the fittest", and energy conservation is only one. Animals build mental models to predict the world because this superpower of seeing into the future is critical to survival - predict where the water is in a drought, where the food is, and how to catch it, etc, etc.

The animal learns as it encounters learning signals - prediction failure - which is the only way to do it. Of course you need to learn/remember something before you can use that in the future, so in that sense it's "ahead of time", but the reason it's done that way because evolution has found that learning patterns will ultimately prove beneficial.

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

#595

Post by LinuxAmbulance »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #258
motbus3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck hired John Carmack and got nothing of it On the other hand, it was only lecunn avoiding meta to go 100p evil creepy mode too

And Carmack complained about the bureaucracy hell that is Facebook.

Coming from a small company like iD, it must have been quite the shock.

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

#596

Post by I_am_tiberius »

abixb wrote: post #481
drstewart wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably wants it to be successful, so that would be a foolish move

Some of the best AI researchers and labs have been from the EU (DeepMind, Alan Turing Institute, Mistral, et al.). We in the US have mature capital markets and stupid easy access to capital, of course, but EU still punches well above its weight when it comes to deep, fundamental AI research.

To be fair, I believe Mistrals' researchers were educated by Meta.

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

#597

Post by justapassenger »

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.

If it ever feels weird - just watch Silicon Valley show again.

"Revenue? No no no no. Why would you go after revenue? If you show people revenue, they’ll ask ‘how much?’. And it will never be enough. The company that was the 100x-er or the 1000x-er becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you’re pre-revenue and you’re a potential pure play.”

We took it now from no revenue to no actual product, or even a concept of a product.

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

#598

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #584
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how the investors feel now seeing what the initial product is?! Maybe investing in all well-connected AI startups is safer than trying to pick the winners and losers?

If you have N startups, and expect at least 1 of them to make >N times what you invest in each, then investing that amount in each one of them will still be expected to have a positive ROI. If none of them "hits it big" then you lose all the investment money, but if any of them grow enormously you profit. Trying to pick winners & losers in advance is much more difficult, investing in an entire business sector is the…

Exactly.

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

#599

Post by ActorNightly »

levocardia wrote: post #501
aiven wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But LLMs still can't reason... in a reasonable sense. No matter how you look at it, it is still a statistical model that guesses next word, it doesn't think/reason per se.

It is insane to think this in 2025 unless you define "reasoning" as "the thing I can do that LLMs cannot"

Reasoning is the act of figuring out how to solve a problem for which you have no previous training set. If an AI can reason, and you give it a standard task of "write me a python file that does x and y", it should be able to complete that task without ever being trained on python code. Or english in general.

The way it would solve that problem would look more like some combination of Hebbian Learning and Mu Zero, where it starts to explore the space around it interms of interactions, information gathering, information parsing, forming associations, to where it eventually understands that your task involves the action of writing bytes to a file in a certain structure that when executed produces certain output, and the rules around the structure that make it give that output.

And it will be able to do this through running as a model on your computer, or a robot that can type on a keyboard, all from the same code.

LLMs appear to "reason" because most people don't actually reason - a lot of people even in technical fields operate on a principle of information lookup. I.e they look at the things that they have been taught to do, figure out which problem fits closest, and repeat steps with a few modifications a long the way. LLMs pretty much do the same thing. If you operate like this, then sure LLMs, "reason". But there is a reason why LLMs are barely useful in actual technical work - under the hood, to make them do things autonomously, you basically have to specify wrapper code/prompts that take often as long to write and finetune as actual code itself.

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

#600

Post by snapcaster »

p1dda wrote: post #291
antirez wrote: post #227

META managed to spend a lot of money into AI to achieve inferior results. Something must change for sure, and you don't want an LLM skeptic at home, in my opinion, especially since the problem is not what LeCun is saying right now (LLMs are not the straight path to AGI), but the fact it used to say for some time that LLMs were just statistical models, stochastic parrots (and this is a precise statement, something mos…

If they're not stochastic parrots, what are they in your opinion?

The problem is the framing. Reductionism always sounds smart and is rhetorically effective but usually just loses all nuance or meaning. I've never met a parrot (stochastic or otherwise) that could write python code or rewrite my emails so what is the point of you describing it like that besides wanting to sound smug and dismissive?
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