Making LeCun report to Wang was the most boneheaded move imaginable. But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.
It wasn’t boneheaded. It was done to make Yann leave. Meta doesn’t want Yann for good reason.
Yann was largely wrong about AI. Yann coined the term stochastic parrot and derrided LLMs as a dead end. It’s now utterly clear the amount of utility LLMs have and that whatever these LLMs are doing it is much more than stochastic parroting.
I wouldn’t give money to Yann, the guy is a stubborn idiot and closed minded. Whatever he’s doing wont even touch LLM technology. He was so publicly deriding LLMs I see no way he will back pedal from that.
I dont think LLMs are the end of the story for agi. But I think they are a stepping stone. Whatever agi is in the end, LLMs or something close to it will be a modular component of aspect of the final product. For LeCunn to dismiss even the possibility of this is idiotic. Horrible investment move to give money to Yann to likely pursue Agi without even considering LLMs.
No, it was because LeCun had no talent for running real life teams and was stuck in a weird place where he hated LLMs. He frankly was wasting Meta’s resources. And making him report to Wang was a way to force him out.
Where is any proof that Yann LeCun is able to deliver that? He's had way more resources than any other lab during his tenure, and yet has nothing substantial to show for it.
Will be interesting to see how he fares outside the ample resources of Meta: Personnel, capital, infrastructure, data, etc. Startups have a lot of flexibility, but a lot of additional moving parts. Good luck!
Fi Fi Lee also recently founded a new AI startup called World Labs, which focus on creating AI world models with spatial intelligence to understand and interact with the 3D world, unlike current LLM AI that primarily processes 2D images and text. Almost exactly the same focus as Yann LeCun's new venture stated in the parent article.
Good. The world model is absolutely the right play in my opinion.
AI Agents like LLMs make great use of pre-computed information. Providing a comprehensive but efficient world model (one where more detail is available wherever one is paying more attention given a specific task) will definitely eke out new autonomous agents.
Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI.
I wish I could help, world models are something I am very passionate about.
> Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI.
There's absolutely no reason to think this. In fact, all of the evidence we have to this point suggests that scaling intelligence horizontally doesn't increase capabilities – you have to scale vertically.
Additionally, as it stands I'd argue there's foundational architectural advancements needed before artificial neutral networks can learn and reason at the same level (or better) than humans across a wide variety of tasks. I suspect when we solve this for LLMs the same techniques could be applied to world models. Fundamentally, the question to ask here is whether AGI is io dependant, and I see no reason to believe this to be the case – if someone removes your eyes and cuts off your hands they don't make you any less generally intelligent.
What the hell does Mark see in Wang? Wang was born into a family whose parents got Chinese government scholarships to study abroad but secretly stayed in the US, and then the guy turns super anti-China. From any angle, this dude just doesn't seem reliable at all.
Everybody has found out how LLMs no longer have a real research expanding horizon. Now most progress will likely be done by tweaks in the data, and lots of hardware. OpenAI's strategy.
And also it has extreme limitations that only world models or RL can fix.
Meta can't fight Google (has integrated supply chain, from TPUs to their own research lab) or OpenAI (brand awareness, best models).
LeCun, who's been saying LLMs are a dead end for years, is finally putting his money where his mouth is. Watch for LeCun to raise an absolutely massive VC round.
He needs a patient investor and realized Zuck is not that. As someone who delivers product and works a lot with researchers I get the constant tension that might exist with competing priorities. Very curious to see how he does, imho the outcome will be either of the extremes - one of the fastest growing companies by valuation ever or a total flop. Either way this move might advance us to whatever end state we are heading towards with AI.
I think it was a plan by Mark to move LeCun out of Meta. And they cannot fire him without bad PR, so they got Wang to lead him. It was only a matter of time before LeCun moved out.
It’s probably better for the world that LeCun is not at Meta. I mean if his direction is the likeliest approach to AGI meta is the last place where you want it.
Right choice IMO. LLMs aren’t going to reach AGI by themselves because language is a thing by itself, very good at encoding concepts into compact representations but doesn’t necessarily have any relation to reality. A human being gets years of binocular visuals of real things, sound input, other various sensations, much less than what we’re training these models with. We think of language in terms of sounds and pictures rather than abstract language.
I wonder, what LeCun wants to do is more fundamental research, i.e. where the timeline to being useful is much longer, maybe 5-10 years at least, and also much more uncertain.
How does this fit together with a startup? Would investors happily invest into this knowing not to expect anything in return for at least the next 5-10 years?
It is the wet dream of a social media company to replace the pesky content creators that demand a share of ad revenue with an generative ai model, that pumps out a constant stream of engagement farming slop, so they can keep all the ad revenue for themselves.
Creating a world model ai is a totally different matter, that requires long term commitment.
Not just social media, all media. Spotify will steer music towards AI generated freebies. And it will get so generically pop, that all your friends will like it, like people mostly enjoy pop now. And when your stubborn self still wants to listen to "handmade" music and discuss it with someone else who would still appreciate it, well, that's where your AI friend comes in.
This seems like a good thing for him to get to fully pursue his own ideas independent of Meta. Large incumbents aren’t usually the place for innovating anything far from mainstream considering the risk and cost of failure. The high level idea of JEPA is sound, but it takes a lot of work to get it trained well at scale before it has value to Meta.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadYann was largely wrong about AI. Yann coined the term stochastic parrot and derrided LLMs as a dead end. It’s now utterly clear the amount of utility LLMs have and that whatever these LLMs are doing it is much more than stochastic parroting.
I wouldn’t give money to Yann, the guy is a stubborn idiot and closed minded. Whatever he’s doing wont even touch LLM technology. He was so publicly deriding LLMs I see no way he will back pedal from that.
I dont think LLMs are the end of the story for agi. But I think they are a stepping stone. Whatever agi is in the end, LLMs or something close to it will be a modular component of aspect of the final product. For LeCunn to dismiss even the possibility of this is idiotic. Horrible investment move to give money to Yann to likely pursue Agi without even considering LLMs.
Where is any proof that Yann LeCun is able to deliver that? He's had way more resources than any other lab during his tenure, and yet has nothing substantial to show for it.
What an insane time horizon to define success. I suppose he easily can raise enough capital for that kind of runway.
AI Agents like LLMs make great use of pre-computed information. Providing a comprehensive but efficient world model (one where more detail is available wherever one is paying more attention given a specific task) will definitely eke out new autonomous agents.
Swarms of these, acting in concert or with some hive mind, could be how we get to AGI.
I wish I could help, world models are something I am very passionate about.
There's absolutely no reason to think this. In fact, all of the evidence we have to this point suggests that scaling intelligence horizontally doesn't increase capabilities – you have to scale vertically.
Additionally, as it stands I'd argue there's foundational architectural advancements needed before artificial neutral networks can learn and reason at the same level (or better) than humans across a wide variety of tasks. I suspect when we solve this for LLMs the same techniques could be applied to world models. Fundamentally, the question to ask here is whether AGI is io dependant, and I see no reason to believe this to be the case – if someone removes your eyes and cuts off your hands they don't make you any less generally intelligent.
And also it has extreme limitations that only world models or RL can fix.
Meta can't fight Google (has integrated supply chain, from TPUs to their own research lab) or OpenAI (brand awareness, best models).
All he's been responsible for is making it worse
No doubt his pitch deck will be the same garbage slides he’s been peddling in every talk since the 2010’s.
Soumith probably knew about Lecun.
I’m taking a second look at my PyTorch stack.
How does this fit together with a startup? Would investors happily invest into this knowing not to expect anything in return for at least the next 5-10 years?