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Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

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Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#91

Regardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI, this is probably a good thing for Europe. We need more well capitalized labs that aren't US or China centric and while I do like Mistral, they just haven't been keeping up on the frontier of model performance and seem like they've sort of pivoted into being integration specialists a…

I didn't really know who he was, so I went and found his wikipedia, which is written like either he wrote it himself to stroke his ego, or someone who likes him wrote it to stroke his ego: > He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before leaving to work on his own startup compa…

https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1441/

This is just the official name of a chair at NYU. I'm not even sure Jacob T. Schwartz is more well known than Yann LeCun

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#92

Regardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI, this is probably a good thing for Europe. We need more well capitalized labs that aren't US or China centric and while I do like Mistral, they just haven't been keeping up on the frontier of model performance and seem like they've sort of pivoted into being integration specialists a…

There seem to be other news articles mentioning that they are setting up in Singapore as their base. https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ai-godfather-raises-1-...

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."

Almost certainly the IP will be held in Singapore for tax reasons.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#94
post #58

> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have a…

I can’t reconcile this dichotomy: most of the landmark deep learning papers were developed with what, by today’s standards, were almost ridiculously small training budgets — from Transformers to dropout, and so on. So I keep wondering: if his idea is really that good — and I genuinely hope it is — why hasn’t it led to anything truly groundbreaking yet? It can’t just be a matter of needing more data or more researcher…

Its a matter of needing more time, which is a resource even SV VCs are scared to throw around. Look at the timeline of all these advancements and how long it took

Lecun introduced backprop for deep learning back in 1989 Hinton published about contrastive divergance in next token prediction in 2002 Alexnet was 2012 Word2vec was 2013 Seq2seq was 2014 AiAYN was 2017 UnicornAI was 2019 Instructgpt was 2022

This makes alot of people think that things are just accelerating and they can be along for the ride. But its the years and years of foundational research that allows this to be done. That toll has to be paid for the successsors of LLMs to be able to reason properly and operate in the world the way humans do. That sowing wont happen as fast as the reaping did. Lecun was to plant those seeds, the others who onky was to eat the fruit dont get that they have to wait

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#95
post #58

> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have a…

> There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything.

That's true for 99% of the scientists, but dismissing their opinion based on them not having done world shattering / ground breaking research is probably not the way to go.

> I sincerely wish we will see more competition

I really wish we don't, science isn't markets.

> Understanding world through videos

The word "understanding" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I find myself prompting again and again for corrections on an image or a summary and "it" still does not "understand" and keeps doing the same thing over and over again.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#96

He couldn't achieve at least parity with LLMs during his days at Meta (and having at his disposal billions in resources most probably) but he'll succeed now? What is the pitch?

The pitch isnt to try to squeeze money out of a product like altman does. Its to lay the groundwork for the next evolution in AI. Llms were built on decades of work and theyve hit their limits. We'll need to invest alot of time building foundations without getting any tangible yeild for the next step to work. Get too greedy and youll be stuck

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#97
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…

I don't understand why online learning is that necessary. If you took Einstein at 40 and surgically removed his hippocampus so he can't learn anything he didn't already know (meaning no online learning), that's still a very useful AGI. A hippocampus is a nice upgrade to that, but not super obviously on the critical path.

> If you took Einstein at 40 and surgically removed his hippocampus so he can't learn anything he didn't already know (meaning no online learning), that's still a very useful AGI.

I like how people are accepting this dubious assertion that Einstein would be "useful" if you surgically removed his hippocampus and engaging with this.

It also calls this Einstein an AGI rather than a disabled human???

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#98
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really know who he was, so I went and found his wikipedia, which is written like either he wrote it himself to stroke his ego, or someone who likes him wrote it to stroke his ego: > He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before leaving to work on his own startup compa…

https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1441/ This is just the official name of a chair at NYU. I'm not even sure Jacob T. Schwartz is more well known than Yann LeCun

Yann is definitely more well-known outside of academia. Inside academia, it's going to depend a lot on your specific background and how old you are.

Re: Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

#99
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this view. How I see it the fundamental bottleneck to AGI is continual learning and backpropagation. Models today are static, and human brains don't learn or adapt themselves with anything close to backpropagation. World models don't solve any of these problems; they are fundamentally the same kind of deep learning architectures we are used to work with. Heck, if you think learning from the world i…

I don't understand why online learning is that necessary. If you took Einstein at 40 and surgically removed his hippocampus so he can't learn anything he didn't already know (meaning no online learning), that's still a very useful AGI. A hippocampus is a nice upgrade to that, but not super obviously on the critical path.

It could possibly be useful but I don't see why it would be AGI.
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