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.
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.
In industry research, someone in a chief position like LeCun should know how to balance long-term research with short-term projects. However, for whatever reason, he consistently shows hostility toward LLMs and engineering projects, even though Llama and PyTorch are two of the most influential projects from Meta AI. His attitude doesn’t really match what is expected from a Chief position at a product company like Facebook. When Llama 4 got criticized, he distanced himself from the project, stating that he only leads FAIR and that the project falls under a different organization. That kind of attitude doesn’t seem suitable for the face of AI at the company. It's not a surprise that Zuck tried to demote him.
> But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.
When did they make groundbreaking foundation models though? DeepMind and OpenAI have done plenty of revolutionary things, what did Meta AI do while being led by LeCun?
I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero.
Which is impossible anyway - I facebook to maintain real human connections and keep up with people who I care about, not to consume infinite content.
Zuckerberg knows what he wants but he rarely knows how to get it. That's been his problem all along. Unlike others he isn't scared to throw ridiculous amounts of money at a problem though and buy companies who do things he can't get done himself.
Zuck did this on purpose, humiliating LeCun so he would leave.
Despite LeCun being proved wrong on LLMs capabilities such as reasoning, he remained extremely negative, not exactly inspiring leadership to the Meta Ai team, he had to go.
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.
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.
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.
A few people mentioned Meta burning through people like LeCun, Carmack and Luckey. We give a lot of credit to individuals in our society. At the same time, there's a frequent pattern of very successful people changing fields, organizations or general environments and suddenly looking very ordinary. In a way, this is a very strong argument to let people settle into a place they can be happiest in. A few examples:
* This is seen very often in Formula One. Schumacher when he went from Ferrari to Mercedes (after a short sabbatical), Vettel from Red Bull to Ferrari, Raikkonen from Lotus to Ferrari (his second stint), Hamilton from Mercedes to Ferrari, Perez at McLaren. There's a lot of Ferrari here so maybe that's the confounding factor.
* This also happens when physicists changed fields. They generally can't replicate their earlier success. Dirac, Feynman, Schwinger, Einstein all went through a transition like this. One explanation is that their early success was precisely so unusual (for anyone) that it would be hard to replicate in general.
* In my experience, this happens at companies too. Whenever we hired a "rockstar" from another company, they would generally struggle (across multiple companies I have been at). This could partly be a result of sabotage from a few vested interests at the new company. But often, it's hard to adjust to a new environment in a short amount of time.
The converse also happens. Sometimes a person considered ordinary goes to a different environment and flourishes. Palmer Luckey has been very successful at Anduril. Stephen Smale was almost failing out of his math PhD program but suddenly started flourishing in his third year IIRC and eventually got a fields medal. Ed Witten experimented with economics, history, linguistics, applied math before switching to physics in his second year and suddenly started making rapid progress.
This is not a very rigorous observation and I am missing many confounding factors.
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.
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.
I see a lot of criticism of LeCun and his views on LLMs as well as his inability to "deliver" products. I don't think that's what he cares about at all. His prominence led to him being picked by Meta. It was a chance to get massive resources that he couldn't get at NYU and the chance to work with smart people outside academia. The pay probably didn't hurt either. In return, Meta became a magnet for smart ML researchers and engineers. If I permit myself to speculate about his thoughts when he took the job, he had no intention of committing to product timelines and generating revenue. Now that Zuckerberg has clearly committed to something he like i.e. building a new product line and expanding the business, it was only a matter of time before LeCun would feel left out and under-resourced.
Interestingly, Yoshua Bengio is the only one who hasn't given into industry even though he could easily raise a lot of money.
I feel like LeCun has been plainly wrong about LLMs. He has been insisting that the stochastic nature of sampling tokens causes a non-zero hallucination property for any given next token such that as output length increases, this will inevitably converge towards garbage.
The reality is that while LLMs can make mistakes mid-output, those interim mistakes don't necessarily detract from the model's final output. We see a version of this all the time with agents as they make tactical mistakes but quickly backtrack and ultimately solve the root problem.
It really felt like LeCun was willing to die on this hill. He continued to argue about really pedantic things like the importance researchers, etc.
I'm glad he's gone and hopeful Meta can actually deliver real AI products for their users with better leadership.
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.
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.
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 would have been just as interesting to read that he moved over to Google, where the real brains and resources are located at.
Meta is now just competing against giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, plus all the new Chinese companies; I see no real chance for them to offer a popular chat model, but rather to market their AI as a bundled product for companies which want to advertise, where the images and videos will be automatically generated by Meta.
To an ex-facebook like myself, it feels like LeCun was more "managed out" than "departing"
Making a veteran like LeCun to report to a new hire (through acquisition) is a strong sign from the management in the direction of - "you should leave"
I'm interested to understand how this works from an IP perspective. This guy is still employed by Meta but is actively fundraising for a new competing startup. Presumably he will have negotiated that Meta forfeits all rights to anything related to his new business? Would be interesting to hear of people's experience/advice for doing this. Or are there some legal entitlements he can avail of?
From the outside, it always looked like they gave LeCun just barely enough compute for small scale experiments. They'd publish a promising new paper, show it works at a small scale, then not use it at all for any of their large AI runs.
I would have loved to see a VLM utilizing JEPA for example, but it simply never happened.
Correct me if I'm wrong but LeCun is focused on learning from video, whereas Fei-Fei Li is doing robotic simulations. Also I think Fei-Fei Li's approach is still using transformers and not buying into JEPA.
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!
I think moving on from LLM's is slightly arrogant. It might just be my understanding, but I feel like there is still much to be discovered. I was hoping for development in spiking neural networks but it might be skipped over. Perhaps I need to dive even deeper and the research is truly well understood and "done" but I can't help but constantly learn something new about language models and neural networks.
Best of luck to LeCun. I hope by World Model's he means embodied AI or humanoid robots. We'll have to wait and see.
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).
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.
[+] [-] mehulashah|4 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sebmellen|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xuancanh|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gnaman|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ACCount37|4 months ago|reply
LLMs get results. None of the Yann LeCun's pet projects do. He had ample time to prove that his approach is promising, and he didn't.
[+] [-] ergocoder|4 months ago|reply
Messi is the best footballer of our era. It doesn't mean he would play well in any team.
[+] [-] motbus3|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FartyMcFarter|4 months ago|reply
When did they make groundbreaking foundation models though? DeepMind and OpenAI have done plenty of revolutionary things, what did Meta AI do while being led by LeCun?
[+] [-] sidcool|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] torginus|4 months ago|reply
I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero.
Which is impossible anyway - I facebook to maintain real human connections and keep up with people who I care about, not to consume infinite content.
[+] [-] ulfw|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] garyclarke27|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FanaHOVA|4 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] enahs-sf|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ekjhgkejhgk|4 months ago|reply
Damn did you just invent that? That's really catchy.
[+] [-] 7moritz7|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] huevosabio|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] archerx|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SilverElfin|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] renegade-otter|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ninetyninenine|4 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] assemblyman|4 months ago|reply
* This is seen very often in Formula One. Schumacher when he went from Ferrari to Mercedes (after a short sabbatical), Vettel from Red Bull to Ferrari, Raikkonen from Lotus to Ferrari (his second stint), Hamilton from Mercedes to Ferrari, Perez at McLaren. There's a lot of Ferrari here so maybe that's the confounding factor.
* This also happens when physicists changed fields. They generally can't replicate their earlier success. Dirac, Feynman, Schwinger, Einstein all went through a transition like this. One explanation is that their early success was precisely so unusual (for anyone) that it would be hard to replicate in general.
* In my experience, this happens at companies too. Whenever we hired a "rockstar" from another company, they would generally struggle (across multiple companies I have been at). This could partly be a result of sabotage from a few vested interests at the new company. But often, it's hard to adjust to a new environment in a short amount of time.
The converse also happens. Sometimes a person considered ordinary goes to a different environment and flourishes. Palmer Luckey has been very successful at Anduril. Stephen Smale was almost failing out of his math PhD program but suddenly started flourishing in his third year IIRC and eventually got a fields medal. Ed Witten experimented with economics, history, linguistics, applied math before switching to physics in his second year and suddenly started making rapid progress.
This is not a very rigorous observation and I am missing many confounding factors.
[+] [-] numpy-thagoras|4 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] llamasushi|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] assemblyman|4 months ago|reply
Interestingly, Yoshua Bengio is the only one who hasn't given into industry even though he could easily raise a lot of money.
[+] [-] thethimble|4 months ago|reply
The reality is that while LLMs can make mistakes mid-output, those interim mistakes don't necessarily detract from the model's final output. We see a version of this all the time with agents as they make tactical mistakes but quickly backtrack and ultimately solve the root problem.
It really felt like LeCun was willing to die on this hill. He continued to argue about really pedantic things like the importance researchers, etc.
I'm glad he's gone and hopeful Meta can actually deliver real AI products for their users with better leadership.
[+] [-] monkeydust|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arresin|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] energy123|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fxtentacle|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] qwertox|4 months ago|reply
Meta is now just competing against giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, plus all the new Chinese companies; I see no real chance for them to offer a popular chat model, but rather to market their AI as a bundled product for companies which want to advertise, where the images and videos will be automatically generated by Meta.
[+] [-] Oras|4 months ago|reply
Brains yes, outcome? I doubt it. Have you used Gemini?
[+] [-] hedayet|4 months ago|reply
Making a veteran like LeCun to report to a new hire (through acquisition) is a strong sign from the management in the direction of - "you should leave"
[+] [-] anshulbhide|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousDan|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Jackson__|4 months ago|reply
I would have loved to see a VLM utilizing JEPA for example, but it simply never happened.
[+] [-] sakex|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gregjw|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] muragekibicho|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dauertewigkeit|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] intalentive|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] beambot|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kittikitti|4 months ago|reply
Best of luck to LeCun. I hope by World Model's he means embodied AI or humanoid robots. We'll have to wait and see.
[+] [-] thiago_fm|4 months ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] alyxya|4 months ago|reply