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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'

#621

Post by keeganpoppen »

whiplash451 wrote: post #474
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.

Meta has the financial oomph to run multiple Bell Labs within its organization. Why they decided not to do that is kind of a puzzle.

because the business hierarchy clearly couldnt support it. take that for what you will.

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

#622

Post by HumanOstrich »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #404
andersa wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems these users are getting it on VS code, while I am getting the exact same thing when using claude code on a Linux server over SSH from Windows Terminal. At this point their app has to be the only thing in common?

That's certainly an interesting observation. I wonder if they produce one client that has some kind of abstraction layer for the user interface & that abstraction layer has hidden or obscured this detail?

> some kind of abstraction layer

You mean a terminal interface?

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

#623

Post by krackers »

natch wrote: post #97
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?

He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He im…

Whatever idea yann has of JEPA and its supposed superiority compared to LLMs, he doesn't seem to have done a good job of "selling it" without resorting to strawmanning LLMs. From what little I gathered (which may be wrong), his objection to LLMs is something like the "predict next token" inductive bias is too weak for models to be able to meaningfully learn models of things like physics, sufficient to properly predict motion and do well on physical reasoning tasks.

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

#624

Post by astrange »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #594
astrange wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

It doesn't necessarily need to model the world to learn how to perform actions though. That was the topic of this old GOFAI research:

https://aaai.org/papers/00268-aaai87-048-pengi-an-implementa...

It instead works by "doing the thing that worked last time".

As an example, you don't usually need to know what is in your garbage in order to take out the trash.

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

#625

Post by toomanyrichies »

xnx wrote: post #486
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.

> 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…

Archived copy of the Bloomberg article here:

https://archive.ph/jGOGW

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

#626

Post by numpy-thagoras »

bigyabai wrote: post #499
numpy-thagoras wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A world model is a persistent representation of the world (however compressed) that is available to an AI for accessing and compute. For example, a weather world model would likely include things like wind speed, surface temperature, various atmospheric layers, total precipitable water, etc. Now suppose we provide a real time live feed to an AI like an LLM, allowing the LLM to have constant, up to date weather knowle…

If your "world model" only models a small portion of the world, I think the more appropriate label is a time-series model. Once you truncate correlated data, the model you're left with isn't very worldly at all.

You don't need to load the entire world model in order to be effective at a task. LLM providers already do something similarly described with model routing.

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

#627

Post by tim333 »

0_____0 wrote: post #370
gdulli wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a "science experiment" has the chance to displace most labor then whoever's successful at the experiment wins the economy, period. There's nothing weird or surprising about the logic of them obsessively chasing it. They all have to, it's a prisoner's dilemma.

Fusion power has the chance to displace most power generation, and whoever is successful at the experiment wins the energy economy, period. However given the long timelines, high cost of research, and the unanswered technical questions around materials that can withstand neutron flux, the total 2024 investment into fusion is only around $10B, versus AI's 250+B. Why are these so different?

Fusion has a lot of difficulties even if they get a rector going - see https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...

It's not clear if after that lot they would be cost competitive with other energy sources.

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

#628

Post by inkysigma »

red2awn wrote: post #491
sigbottle wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd argue SSI and Thinking Machines Lab seem to that environment you are thinking about. Industry labs that focuses on research without immediate product requirement.

I don't think that quite matches because those labs have very clear directions of research in LLMs. The theming is a bit more constrained and I don't know if a line of research as vague as what LeCun is pursuing would be funded by those labs.

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

#629

Post by tim333 »

consumer451 wrote: post #24
killerstorm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LeCun always said that LLMs do not lead to AGI.

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.

Superhuman robots built better robots and near infinite stuff as requested.

Human minds may be able to merge giving immortality.

Building minds may let us understand our own better and cure diseases.

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

#630

Post by ricardobeat »

KPGv2 wrote: post #363
ricardobeat wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that the Netherlands seems to still live in the dotcom boom to this day. Want to adopt a pet? verhuisdieren.nl. Want to buy wall art? wall-art.nl. Need cat5 cable? kabelshop.nl. 8/10 times there is a (legit) online store for whatever you need, to the point where one of the local e-commerce giants (Coolblue) buys this type of domain and aliases them to their main site.

This is still the case in the US, too. I don't know why people are talking like it stopped happening. amazon.com, amazon.com, amazon.com, amazon.com All these things are still e-tail here, too. We didn't go back to B&M.

I was making commentary about the niche/independent nature of these online retailers (another example: graszaaddirect.nl, specialized in grass seeds), not that e-commerce itself survived the bubble.

Having a dense country where you reach any opposite end in where it's coming from (sometimes it's Germany) as delivery time is the same. That would not be the case for the US, you'd require a web of distributors.

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