What is going on at meta? Soumith probably knew about Lecun. I’m taking a second look at my PyTorch stack.
Can you explain your reasoning a bit more?
Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
601–610 of 680 posts
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Used to be a Google X. Not sure at what scale it was. But if any state/central bank was clever they would subsidize this. That's a better trickle down strategy. Until we get to agi and all new discoveries are autonomously led by AI that is :p
Google X is a complete failure. Maybe they had fei-fei on staff for a short while but most of her work was done elsewhere.
> Google X is a complete failure
- Google Brain
- Google Watch/Wear OS
- Gcam/Pixel Camera
- Insight (indoor GMaps)
- Waymo
- Verily
https://x.company/projects/#graduate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Development#Graduated_projec...
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you mean that Mark Zuckerberg has always been a peer to YLC in terms of responsibility towards Meta's shareholders?
I mean any entity that can afford good lawyers seems to not care about responsibility in the slightest.
Is this a generic, throwaway comment or do you have specific examples of Yann LeCun using lawyers to evade responsibility for his work/actions?
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meta is in last place among the big tech companies making an AI push because of lecun’s llm hostility. Refusing to properly invest in the biggest product breakthrough this century was not even a little bit warranted. He had more than enough resources available to do the research he wanted and create a fantastic open source llm.
Meta has made some fantastic llm's publically avliable many of which continue to outperform all but the qwen series in real world applications. LLMs cannot do any of the major claims made for them, so competing at the current frontier is a massive resource waste. Right now a locally running 8b model with large context window (10k tokens+) beat google/openAI models easily on any task you like. why would anyone then pa…
I dont really agree with your perception of current LLMs, but the point is it doesnt even matter. This is a pr war. Lecun lost it for meta. Meta needs to be thought of as an AI leader to gain traction in their metaverse stuff. They can live with everyone thinking theyre evil but if everyone thinks theyre lame has beens they are fucked.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's been true for the last year or two, but it feels like we're at an inflection point. All of the announcements from OpenAI for the last couple of months have been product focused - Instant Checkout, AgentKit, etc. Anthropic seems 100% focused on Claude Code. We're not hearing as much about AGI/Superintelligence (thank goodness) as we were earlier this year, in fact the big labs aren't even talking much about the…
Meta hiring researchers en masse at $100m+ pay packages is fairly new, as of this summer. I don't know if that's indicative of the market as a whole though. Zuck just seems really gutted they fell behind with Llama 4.
It was a few researchers and they stopped doing that already. In a way, the AI market in H1 2025 is VERY different already than H2 2025.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#606Most 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.
Beats giving all the money to the person who says the word 'blockchain' the most.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#607Earlier 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…
That's fine but none of them expected to invest 2 BILLIONS to get a half-backed IaaS product as the result. That would be fine if the investment had been $10M, but that's the math isn't mathing with that level of funding.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still have to understand why you think another AI winter is coming. Everyyyybody is using it, everybody is racing to invent the next big thing. What could go wrong? [apart from a market crash, more related to financial bubble than technical barriers]
> apart from a market crash, more related to financial bubble than technical barriers _That is what an AI winter is_. Like, if you look at the previous ones, it's a cycle of over-hype, over-promising, funding collapse after the ridiculous over-promising does not materialise. But the tech tends to hang around. Voice recognition did not change the world in the 90s, but neither did it entirely vanish once it was realise…
So you imply the current LLMs are underperforming?
Ummm, ok...
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I never understood LeCun's statement that we need to pivot toward the visual aspects of things because the bitrate of text is low while visual input through the eye is high. Text and languages contain structured information and encode a lot of real-world complexity (or it's "modelling" that). Not saying we won't pivot to visual data or world simulations, but he was clearly not the type of person to compete w…
Text and language contain only approximate information filtered through humans eyes and brains. Also animals don't have language and can show quite advanced capabilities compared to what we can currently do in robotics. And if you do enough mindfulness you can dissociate cognition/consciousness from language. I think we are lured because how important language is for us humans, but intuitively it's obvious to me lang…
Seems like that "approximation" is perfectly sufficient for just about any task.
That whole take about the language being basically useless without a human mind to back it lost its legs in 2022.
In the meanwhile, what do those "world model" AIs do? Video generation? Meta didn't release anything like that. Robotics, self-driving? Also basically nothing from Meta there.
In the meanwhile, other companies are perfectly content with bolting multimodal transformers together for robotics tasks. Gemini Robotics being a research example - while modern Tesla FSD stack being a production grade one. Gemini even uses a language transformer as a key part of its stack.
Re: Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
#610Most 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.
Hey listen, corporate owners will pay flesh to ultimately reduce spending on the workforce.