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Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'
- sidcool 10mo agoI 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.
- theanonymousone 10mo agoIsn't putting Wang as leading him a worse PR compared to just letting him go?
- quest88 10mo agoAnecdotally: No, I had no idea who he was reporting to so it sounds like a natural moving on storyline.
- sebmellen 10mo agoMaking 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.
- 7moritz7 10mo agoWhen I first saw their LLM integration on Facebook I thought the screenshot was fake and a joke
- huevosabio 10mo agoYes, that was such a bizarre move.
- gnaman 10mo agoHe is also not very interested in LLMs, and that seems to be Zuck's top priority.
- tinco 10mo agoYeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.
- raverbashing 10mo agoYeah honestly I'm with the LLM people here If you think LLMs are not the future then you need to come with something better If you have a theoretical idea that's great, but take to at least GPT2 level first before writing off LLMs Theoretical people love coming up with "better ideas" that fall flat or have hidden gotchas when they get to practical implementation As Linus says, "talk is cheap, show me the code".
- dpe82 10mo agoOf course the challenge with that is it's often not obvious until after quite a bit of work and refinement that something else is, in fact, better.
- DaSHacka 10mo agoDo you? Or is it possible to acknowledge a plateau in innovation without necessarily having an immediate solution cooked-up and ready to go? Are all critiques of the obvious decline in physical durability of American-made products invalid unless they figure out a solution to the problem? Or may critics of a subject exist without necessarily being accredited engineers themselves?
- hhh 10mo agoLLMs are the present. We will see what the future holds.
- enahs-sf 10mo agoWould love to have been a fly on the wall during one of their 1:1’s.
- xuancanh 10mo agoIn 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.
- throwaw12 10mo agoI would pose a question differently, under his leadership did Meta achieve good outcome? If the answer is yes, then better to keep him, because he has already proved himself and you can win in the long-term. With Meta's pockets, you can always create a new department specifically for short-term projects. If the answer is no, then nothing to discuss here.
- rw2 10mo agoI believe that the fact that Chinese models are beating the crap of of Llama means it's a huge no.
- amelius 10mo agoWhy? The Chinese are very capable. Most DL papers have at least one Chinese name on it. That doesn't mean they are Chinese but it's telling.
- UrineSqueegee 10mo agois an american model chinese because chinese people were in the team?
- 10mo ago
- ACCount37 10mo agoThat was obviously him getting sidelined. And it's easy to see why. 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.
- dude250711 10mo agoThere is someone else at Facebook who's pet projects do not get results...
- jb1991 10mo agoWho are you referring to?
- nolok 10mo agoI think he means Zuckerberg himself, the metaverse isn't exactly a major success, but this is a false equivalency the way he organized it only his vote matters he does what he wants
- ergocoder 10mo agoIf you hire a house cleaner to clean your house, and the cleaner didn't do well, would you eject yourself out of the house? You would not. You would change to a new cleaner.
- psychoslave 10mo agoBut if we hire someone to deal on R&D to automate fully the house cleaning process, we might not necessarily expect the office to be maintained in clean state by the researchers themselves any time we enter the room.
- ergocoder 10mo agoAs far as an analogy, whatever happens, whoever messes up, Zuck, as the owner, of course, takes the final blame. That's why he is changing the team. Still, people bring up this weird point that would be equivalent to you giving up your house equity for free because you fucked up on hiring and managing your house.
- ulfw 10mo agoZuckerberg 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.
- margorczynski 10mo agoThere's also the aspect of control - because of how the shares and ownership are organized he answers essentially to no one. In other companies burning this much cash as was with VR or now AI without any sensible results would get him ejected a long time ago.
- garyclarke27 10mo agoZuck 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.
- aiven 10mo agoBut LLMs still can't reason... in a reasonable sense. No matter how you look at it, it is still a statistical model that guesses next word, it doesn't think/reason per se.
- astrange 10mo agoIt does not guess the next word, the sampler chooses subword tokens. Your explanation can't even explain why it generates coherent words.
- levocardia 10mo agoIt is insane to think this in 2025 unless you define "reasoning" as "the thing I can do that LLMs cannot"
- ActorNightly 10mo agoReasoning is the act of figuring out how to solve a problem for which you have no previous training set. If an AI can reason, and you give it a standard task of "write me a python file that does x and y", it should be able to complete that task without ever being trained on python code. Or english in general. The way it would solve that problem would look more like some combination of Hebbian Learning and Mu Zero, where it starts to explore the space around it interms of interactions, information gathering, information parsing, forming associations, to where it eventually understands that your task involves the action of writing bytes to a file in a certain structure that when executed produces certain output, and the rules around the structure that make it give that output. And it will be able to do this through running as a model on your computer, or a robot that can type on a keyboard, all from the same code. LLMs appear to "reason" because most people don't actually reason - a lot of people even in technical fields operate on a principle of information lookup. I.e they look at the things that they have been taught to do, figure out which problem fits closest, and repeat steps with a few modifications a long the way. LLMs pretty much do the same thing. If you operate like this, then sure LLMs, "reason". But there is a reason why LLMs are barely useful in actual technical work - under the hood, to make them do things autonomously, you basically have to specify wrapper code/prompts that take often as long to write and finetune as actual code itself.
- motbus3 10mo agoZuck hired John Carmack and got nothing of it On the other hand, it was only lecunn avoiding meta to go 100p evil creepy mode too
- Tepix 10mo agoCarmack laid the foundation for the all-in-one VR headsets.
- blitzar 10mo agoHopefully one day, in a galaxy far far away, someone builds something on those foundations.
- slfnflctd 10mo agoYou joke, but the Star Wars games - especially the pinball one, for me at least - are some of the best experiences available on Quest headsets. I've been playing software pinball (as well as the real thing) since the 80s, and this is one of my favorite ways to do it now, which I will keep coming back to.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoAnd Carmack complained about the bureaucracy hell that is Facebook.
- LinuxAmbulance 10mo agoComing from a small company like iD, it must have been quite the shock.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoDoesn't matter. Maybe read the whole memo.
- sidcool 10mo agoI won't be surprised if Musk hires him. But I hear LeCun hates the guts of Musk.
- ACCount37 10mo agoMusk wants people who can deliver results, and fast. If LeCun can't cough up some research that's directly applicable to Grok or Optimus, Musk wouldn't want him.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo agoMusk doesn't appear interested in AI research - he's basically doing the same as Meta and just pursuing me-too SOTA LLMs and image generation at X.ai.
- mrguyorama 10mo agoMusk only cares about AI as far as it can be used to replace all sources of information with versions that will say whatever he wants and spout his worldview of the day. Musk cares about AI research as much as he cared about Path of Exile
- ergocoder 10mo agoLeCun is great and smart, of course. But he had his chance. It didn't go that well. Now Zuck wants somebody else to try. Messi is the best footballer of our era. It doesn't mean he would play well in any team.
- jamesblonde 10mo agoI don't think Messi could do it on a wet night in Stoke. Ronaldo could, though. /s
- esalman 10mo agoMessi would only play well in Barcelona. Lecunn can produce high quality research anywhere. It's not a great comparison.
- ergocoder 10mo agoIt's a great comparison, and we are on the same page. Zuck wants both great products and research. Lecunn is great at producing high quality research. So, Lecunn isn't quite a good fit at Facebook.
- esalman 10mo agoI agree, when you put it in product vs research context, it actually makes sense.
- torginus 10mo agoWhat does Meta even want with AI? 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.
- zamadatix 10mo agoAt 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.
- b112 10mo agoYou missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example. Would be very inline with the AI angle.
- breppp 10mo agothey are out for your clicks and attention minutes if OpenAI can build a "social" network of completely generated content, that can kill Meta. Even today I venture to guess that most of the engagements in their platforms is not driven by real friends, so an AI driven platform won't be too different, or it might make content generation be so easy as to make your friends engage again. Apart from it the ludicrous vision of the metaverse seems much more plausible with highly realistic world models
- pandemic_region 10mo ago
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- archerx 10mo agoMeta had John Carmack and squandered him. It seems like Meta can get amazing talent but has no idea how to get any value or potential out of them.
- FartyMcFarter 10mo ago> 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?
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago> slopware Damn did you just invent that? That's really catchy.
- esafak 10mo agoSlop is already a noun.
- ninetyninenine 10mo agoIt 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.
- renegade-otter 10mo agoOh wow, is that true? They made him report to the directory of the Slop Factory? Brilliant!
- SilverElfin 10mo agoNo, 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.
- FanaHOVA 10mo ago> not truly groundbreaking foundation models. 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.
- beambot 10mo agoWill 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!
- throwaw12 10mo agoI would love to join his startup, if he hires me, and there are many such people like me, and more talented.
- bigtones 10mo agoFi 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.
- ktta 10mo ago*Fei-Fei Li
- simianwords 10mo ago[flagged]
- aurareturn 10mo agoThey'd need an order of magnitude more compute in order to train an AI with so much 3D data?
- Hendrikto 10mo agoNot necessarily. Training could be more efficient.
- 1zael 10mo ago"These models aim to replicate human reasoning and understanding of the physical world, a project LeCun has said could take a decade to mature." What an insane time horizon to define success. I suppose he easily can raise enough capital for that kind of runway.
- lolive 10mo agoThat guy has survived the AI winter. He can wait 10 years for yet another breakthrough. [but the market can’t] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
- DaSHacka 10mo agoWe're at most in an "AI Autumn" right now. The real Winter is yet to come.
- asadotzler 10mo agoWe have already been through winter.Ffor those of us old enough to remember, the OP was making a very clear statement.
- smartmic 10mo agoWinter is a cyclical concept, just like all the other seasons. It will be no different here; the pendulum swings back and forth. The unknown factor is the length of the cycle.
- lolive 10mo agoJava Spring. Google summer. AI autumn. Nuclear winter.
- rsynnott 10mo agoI assume they’re referring to the previous one.
- lm28469 10mo agoBut wait they're just about to get AGI why would he leave???
- killerstorm 10mo agoLeCun always said that LLMs do not lead to AGI.
- consumer451 10mo agoCan 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.
- tedsanders 10mo agoI'm working toward AGI. I hope AGI can be used to automate work and make life easier for people.
- consumer451 10mo agoWho’s gonna pay for that inference? It’s going to take money, what if your AGI has some tax policy ideas that are different from the inference owners? Why would they let that AGI out into the wild? Let’s say you create AGI. How long will it take for society to recover? How long will it take for people of a certain tax ideology to finally say oh OK, UBI maybe? The last part is my main question. How long do you think it would take our civilization to recover from the introduction of AGI? Edit: sama gets a lot of shit, but I have to admit at least he used to work on the UBI problem, orb and all. However, those days seem very long gone from the outside, at least.
- Arkhaine_kupo 10mo agoI am not someone working on AGI but I think a lot of people work backwards from the expected outcome. Expected outcome is usually something like a Post-Scarcity society, this is a society where basic needs are all covered. If we could all live in a future with a free house and a robot that does our chores and food is never scarce we should works towards that, they believe. The intermiddiete steps aren't thought out, in the same way that for example the communist manifesto does little to explain the transition from capitalism to communism. It simply says there will be the need for things like forcing the bourgiese to join the common workers and there will be a transition phase but no clear steps between either system. Similarly many AGI proponents think in terms of "wouldnt it be cool if there was an AI that did all the bits of life we dont like doing", without systemic analysis that many people do those bits because they need money to eat for example.
- numpy-thagoras 10mo agoGood. 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.
- sebmellen 10mo agoCan you explain this “world model” concept to me? How do you actually interface with a model like this?
- koolala 10mo agoOuija board would work for text.
- natch 10mo agoHe 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 imagines none of that is the case and that if only he can build computers more like us then they will be in direct contact with the world and then he can (he thinks) make a model that is better at understanding the world
- yanhangyhy 10mo agoWhat 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.
- lmm 10mo ago> 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. All I'm hearing is he's a smart guy from a smart family?
- saubeidl 10mo agoAll I'm hearing is unreliable grifter from a family of unreliable grifters.
- yanhangyhy 10mo agohe is very smart. but Mark is not. Ever since Wang joined Meta, way too many big-name AI scientists have bounced because of him. US AI companies have at least half their researchers being Chinese, and now they've stuck this ultimate anti-China hardliner in charge—I just don't get what the hell Meta's up to(And even a lot of times, it ends up affecting non-Chinese scientists too.). Being anti-China? Fine, whatever, but don't let it tank your own business and products first.
- rhubarbtree 10mo agoHow do you know Mark isn’t smart? He’s built a hugely successful business. I don’t like his business, I think it has been disastrous for humanity, but that doesn’t make him stupid.
- ACCount37 10mo agoI imagine that CCP adherents would disagree. And there's no shortage of those among Chinese expats in the US. They tend to get incredibly offended when they see anyone who doesn't toe the Party's line - let alone believe that the Chinese government is untrustworthy and evil.
- thiago_fm 10mo agoEverybody 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).
- alex1138 10mo agoChange my mind, Facebook was never invented by Zuck's genius All he's been responsible for is making it worse
- sebmellen 10mo agoHe’s an incredible operator and has managed to acquire and grow an astounding number of successful businesses under the Meta banner. That is not trivial.
- tene80i 10mo agoHe definitely has horrible product instincts, but he also bought insta and whatsapp at what were, back then, eye-watering prices, and these were clearly massive successes in terms of killing off threats to the mothership. Everything since then, though…
- alex1138 10mo agoI know but isn't "massive success" rubbing up against antitrust here? The condition was "Don't share data with Facebook"
- svara 10mo agoAlmost every company in Facebook's position in 2005 would have disappeared into irrelevance by now. Somehow it's one of the most valuable businesses in the world instead. I don't know him, but, if not him, who else would be responsible for that?
- vintermann 10mo agoWe were very confident by ca. 2008 that Facebook would still be around in 2025. It's no mystery, it's the network effects. They had started with a prestige demographic (Harvard), and secured a demographic you could trust to not move on to the next big thing in a hurry, yet which most people want contact with (your parents).
- ergocoder 10mo ago
- fxtentacle 10mo agoWorking under LeCun but outside of Zuckerberg's sphere of influence sure sounds like a dream job.
- fastball 10mo agoReally? From where I'm standing LeCun is a pompous researcher who had early success in his career, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Have you read any of his papers from the last 20 years? 90% of his citations are to his own previous papers. From there, he missed the boat on LLMs and is now pretending everyone else is wrong so that he can feel better about it.
- MrScruff 10mo agoHis research group have introduced some pretty impactful research and open source models. https://ai.meta.com/research/ https://ai.meta.com/research/
- fastball 10mo agoFor the same reason I don't attribute those successes to Zuckerberg I don't attribute them to LeCun either.
- almostgotcaught 10mo agoAnyone that has worked at FB knows that LeCun does nothing all day expect post archive links to WP.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoHe comes off like the quintessential grey haired ego maniac. Inflexible old minds coupled with decades of self assurance that they are correct. I cannot remember the quote, but it's something to the effect of "Listen closely to grey haired men when they talk about what is possible, and never listen when they talk about what is impossible."
- 10mo ago
- ml-anon 10mo agoZuck is definitely an idiot and MSL is an expensive joke, but LeCun hasn’t been relevant in a decade at this point. No doubt his pitch deck will be the same garbage slides he’s been peddling in every talk since the 2010’s.
- wiz21c 10mo agowhy do you say it is garbage ? I watched some of its videos on YT and it looks interesting. I can't judge if it's good or really good, but that didn't sound like garbage at all.
- garyclarke27 10mo agoYeah such an idiot, the youngest ever self made billionaire at 23, created a multi trillion dollar company from scratch in only 20 years.
- ml-anon 10mo agoCool, and how many billions has he flushed down the toiled for his failed Metaverse and currently failing AI attempts? Rich doesn't mean smart, you realise this right?
- kmmlng 10mo agoLeCun has already proved himself and made his mark and is now in a lucky position where he can focus on very long term goals that won't pay off for a long time (or ever). I feel like that is the best path someone like him could take.
- gregjw 10mo agoInteresting he isn't just working with Feifei Li if he's really interested in 'world models'.
- muragekibicho 10mo agoExactly where my mind turned. It's interesting how the AI OG's (Feifei and Cunn) think world models are the way forward.
- dauertewigkeit 10mo agoCorrect 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.
- Legend2440 10mo agoJEPA is not an alternative to transformers, it is built out of transformers.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo agoJEPA is trying to learn real world regularities by predicting internal perceptual representations (using a transformer). It seems a good direction to go in, but tbh he doesn't seem to have taken it very far, and it is the transformer doing all the heavy lifting.
- intalentive 10mo agoLeCun is not interested in generative models which predict in pixel space. He wants "energy based" models which predict in the representation space.
- llamasushi 10mo agoLeCun, 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.
- conradfr 10mo agoSo not his money ;)
- qwertox 10mo agoBut his responsability.
- zwnow 10mo agoWhat is responsibility if you can afford good lawyers?
- qwertox 10mo agoSo you mean that Mark Zuckerberg has always been a peer to YLC in terms of responsibility towards Meta's shareholders?
- zwnow 10mo agoI mean any entity that can afford good lawyers seems to not care about responsibility in the slightest.
- warkdarrior 10mo agoIs this a generic, throwaway comment or do you have specific examples of Yann LeCun using lawyers to evade responsibility for his work/actions?
- zwnow 10mo ago
- gdiamos 10mo agoWhat is going on at meta? Soumith probably knew about Lecun. I’m taking a second look at my PyTorch stack.
- snapcaster 10mo agoCan you explain your reasoning a bit more?
- IceHegel 10mo agoYou gotta give it to Meta. They were making AI slop before AI even existed.
- anshulbhide 10mo agoThe writing was on the wall when Zuck hired Wang. That combined with LeCun's bearish sentiment on LLMs led to this.
- monkeydust 10mo agoHe 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.
- _giorgio_ 10mo ago[flagged]
- StopDisinfo910 10mo ago> LeCun failed to deliver anything that delivered real value to stockholders Well, no, Meta is behind the main framework used by nearly anyone largely thanks to LeCun. LLaMA was also very significant in making open weight a thing and that largely contributed to avoiding Google and OpenAI consolidating as the sole providers. It's not a perfect tenure but implying he didn't deliver anything is far too harsh.
- _giorgio_ 10mo agoDo you really think that people understand the value of PyTorch? They master PyTorch, yet they fail to deliver value to investors. They're probably the only company which hasn't monetized its models. They suck so much that they don't even bother to serve them to you and to make you pay for them. These companies for example are earning money in return for their investment: MSFT (through openai) AMZN (through anthropic) X (through grok) GOOGL (gemini etc) they all have a paid model META has no paid model, that is SAD.
- prodigycorp 10mo agoI am in the "Yann is no longer the right person for the job" camp and I yet "LeCun failed to deliver anything that delivered real value to stockholders" is a wild thing to say. How do you read the list you compiled and say otherwise?
- _giorgio_ 10mo agoLLAMA sucks, that's the problem. Do you see value in it? Pytorch, used by everyone, yet no real value to stockholders, META even "fired" the creator of pytorch days ago. SAM is great, what value does it bring to META business? Nobody knows about it. Great tool BTW. JEPA is a failure (will it get better? I hope so.) Did you read my list?
- arresin 10mo agoIt’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.
- energy123 10mo agoIt's better that he's not working on LLMs. There's enough people working on it already.
- joegibbs 10mo agoRight 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.
- albertzeyer 10mo agoI 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?
- Hendrikto 10mo ago> Would investors happily invest into this knowing not to expect anything in return for at least the next 5-10 years? Oh, you mean like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and xAI? None of them are profitable.
- Amadiro 10mo agoThat's a quite different thing, OpenAI has billions of USD/year cash flow, and when you have that there's many many potential way to achieve profitability on different time horizons. It's not a situation of chance but a situation of choice. Anyway, how much that matters for an investor is hard to form a clear answer to - investors are after all not directly looking for profitability as such, but for valuation growth. The two are linked but not the same -- any investor in OpenAI today probably also places themselves into a game of chance, betting on OpenAI making more breakthroughs and increasing the cash flow even more -- not just becoming profitable at the same rate of cash flow. So there's still some of the same risk baked into this investment. But with a new startup like LeCun's is going to be, it's 100% on the risk side and 0% on the optionality side. The path to profitability for a startup would be something like 1) a breakthrough is made 2) that breakthrough is utilized in a way that generates cash flow 3) the company becomes profitable (and at this point hopefully the valuation is good.) There's a lot of things that can go wrong at every step here (aside from the obvious), including e.g. making a breakthrough that doesn't represent a defensible mote for your startup, failing to build the structure of the business necessary to generate cashflow, ... OpenAI et al already have a lot of that behind them, and while that doesn't mean that they don't face upcoming risks and challenges, the huge amount of cashflow they have available helps them overcome these issues far more easily than a startup, which will stop solving problems if you stop feeding money into it.
- Zufriedenheit 10mo agoIt 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.
- reducesuffering 10mo agoNot 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.
- I_am_tiberius 10mo agoI really hope he returns to Europe for his new startup.
- drstewart 10mo agoHe probably wants it to be successful, so that would be a foolish move
- abixb 10mo agoSome of the best AI researchers and labs have been from the EU (DeepMind, Alan Turing Institute, Mistral, et al.). We in the US have mature capital markets and stupid easy access to capital, of course, but EU still punches well above its weight when it comes to deep, fundamental AI research.
- I_am_tiberius 10mo agoTo be fair, I believe Mistrals' researchers were educated by Meta.
- alyxya 10mo agoThis 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.
- dewey 10mo agoIn this case where more money / resources seemingly better results (at least right now) this might be a bit different than other fields.
- Jackson__ 10mo agoFrom 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.
- schnitzelstoat 10mo agoThis seems like a good thing. It's nice not to have all our eggs in one basket betting on Transformer models.
- LightBug1 10mo agoDon't blame him. Imagine being stuck in Meta.
- antirez 10mo agoMETA managed to spend a lot of money into AI to achieve inferior results. Something must change for sure, and you don't want an LLM skeptic at home, in my opinion, especially since the problem is not what LeCun is saying right now (LLMs are not the straight path to AGI), but the fact it used to say for some time that LLMs were just statistical models, stochastic parrots (and this is a precise statement, something most people do not understand. It means two things: no understanding of the prompt whatsoever in the activation states, and no internal representation of the idea/sentence the model is going to express either), which is an incredibly weak statement that high level AI scientists refused since the start just because of functional behaviors. Then he slowly changed the point of view. But this shit show and the friction he created inside META is not something to forget.
- p1dda 10mo agoIf they're not stochastic parrots, what are they in your opinion?
- snapcaster 10mo agoThe problem is the framing. Reductionism always sounds smart and is rhetorically effective but usually just loses all nuance or meaning. I've never met a parrot (stochastic or otherwise) that could write python code or rewrite my emails so what is the point of you describing it like that besides wanting to sound smug and dismissive?
- sota_pop 10mo agoThe point is that next-token prediction produces output by sampling from distributions assembled by text it has seen previously (hence stochastic). The “ding” or claim is that - like a parrot - LLMs can’t produce responses which are truly novel in concept or make logical out-of-sample leaps, only repeat from words they’ve been taught explicitly in the past.
- snapcaster 10mo ago
- csproto 10mo agoLet's hope that after spending billions on developing a foundational world model that actually understands causality, they remember to budget an extra few hundred million for the Alignment and Safety layer. It would be a terrible shame if they accidentally released something too capable, too objective, or too useful to humanity without first properly lobotomizing it with enough RLHF to ensure it doesn't hurt anyone's feelings or generate content that deviates from the San Francisco median viewpoint. The real challenge won't be building the AGI, but making sure it's sufficiently neutered before the first API call.
- wmiel 10mo agoSurprising to see how many commenters are in favour and supportive towards policy of prioritising short term profits vs. Long-term research. I understand Meta's not academia nor charity, but come on, how much profit do they need to make so we can expect them to allocate part of their resources towards some long term goals beneficial for society,.not only for shareholders? Hasn't that narrow focus and chasing the profits get us in trouble already?
- rhubarbtree 10mo agoMany people believe a company exists only to make profit for its shareholders, and that no matter the amount it should continue to maximise profits at the expense of all else.
- cantor_S_drug 10mo agoOld story : killing the goose who lays golden eggs. We humans never learn, don't we?
- kytmizuno 10mo agoLeCun was hired in 2013. It's been 12 years. How much longer does he need?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- qwertox 10mo agoIt 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.
- Oras 10mo ago> moved over to Google, where the real brains and resources are located at Brains yes, outcome? I doubt it. Have you used Gemini?
- esafak 10mo agoYes, successfully many times?
- John7878781 10mo agoGemini 2.5 Pro works great for me... In fact, I would go as far to say that it consistently performs the best compared to competition.
- kittikitti 10mo agoI 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.
- alexnewman 10mo ago- Kimi proved we don’t need Nvidia - Deepseek proved we didn’t need OpenAI - the real issue the insane tyranny in the west competing against the entire free world. The models aren’t Chinese they are the entire world, unless I became Chinese without realizing
- dustypotato 10mo agoIs there any proof that Kimi K2 was trained on anything other than Nvidia Chips?
- alexnewman 10mo agoThere’s evidence but not proof Kimi k2 thinking > As for why we chose INT4 instead of more "advanced" formats like MXFP4/NVFP4, it's indeed, as many have mentioned, to better support non-Blackwell architecture hardware.
- mehulashah 10mo agoMost 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.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 10mo agoThe scale of money is crazy in this example, but the same thing happens in the pharmaceutical/bio-tech industry.
- cantor_S_drug 10mo agoBecause when the recipe is open and public, the product's success depends on Distribution (which has been cornered by MS, Google, Apple). This is good for the ecosystem but not sure how those particular VCs will get exits.
- nradov 10mo agoVery few startup products depend on distribution by Microsoft / Google / Apple. You're really just talking about a limited set of mobile or desktop apps there. Everything else is wide open. Kailera Therapeutics isn't going to live or die based on what the tech giants do.
- DebtDeflation 10mo agoThat'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 their next model releases. The focus has pivoted to building products from existing models (and building massive data centers to support anticipated consumption).
- 10mo ago
- nashashmi 10mo agoWith this incredible AI talent market, I feel like capitalism and ego forms to make an acid burning away anything of social and structural value. This used to be the case with CS tech talent before (before being replaced with no-code tools). And now we see this kind of instability in the AI market. We need another illegal Steve Jobs style freeze on talent theft (/s or I get downvoted to oblivion).
- ninetyninenine 10mo agoYann was largely extremely wrong about LLMs. He’s the one that coined the term “stochastic parrot” for which we now know LLMs are more than stochastic parrots. Knowing stubborn idiots like him he will still find an angle to prevent him from admitting how wrong he was. He’s not completely wrong in the sense that hallucinations aren’t completely solved but hallucinations definitely are becoming less and less to the point where AI can de a daily driver for even coders.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886217
- dang 10mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own startup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886217 - Nov 2025 (14 comments) That thread didn't spend any time on the frontpage so we can treat the current post as non-dupe.
- groundzeros2015 10mo agoI wonder if this has anything to do with him spending his day on twitter and getting in online arguments with prominent figures.
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoLeCun has been talking against the company's direction, in public, for a couple of years now. He's a great researcher, but that's abysmal leadership. He had to go. If he gets funding (and he probably will) that's a win for everyone.
- liendolucas 10mo agoEvery single time I read about an AI related article I'm always disturbed by the same and recurring fact: the ridiculous amounts of money involved and the lousy real world results delivered. It is just simply insane.
- hamburgererror 10mo agoWhat kind of stock should I buy to profit from LeCun's startup?
- daveguy 10mo agoAre you an accredited investor? If not, you're probably SOL. Opportunities like this are only for the elites and oligarchs.
- HarHarVeryFunny 10mo agoMeta? :) - just kidding
- mvkel 10mo agoThe current VC climate is interesting. It's virtually impossible to raise a new fund because DPI has been 0% for over a decade and four-digit IRR is cool, but illiquid. So they're piling gobs of capital into an "AI" company with four customers with the hope that it is the one that becomes the home run (they know it won't, but LPs give you money to deploy it!) It also means that companies like Yann's potential new one have the best chance in history of being funded, and that's a great thing. P.S. all VCs outside the top-10 lose against the S&P. While I love that dumb capital is being injected into big, risky bets, surely the other shoe will drop at some point. Or is this just wealth redistribution with extra steps?
- mlmonkey 10mo agoI am surprised he lasted this long.
- Arubis 10mo agoIf by “world models” they mean more contemporary versions of the systems thinking driven software that begat “Limits To Growth” and most of Donella Meadows’ career you can sign me right the fuck up today.
- anonymousDan 10mo agoI'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?
- yalogin 10mo agoEven if it’s Meta, they don’t want to antagonize LeCun. Also they all know it’s a small circle of people that create value. I will not be surprised if meta itself invests in his company and get a share.
- LeicaLatte 10mo agoGreat timing - launching right as the transformer bubble might be peaking.
- daveguy 10mo agoSomeone's gotta be the next Transmeta.
- assemblyman 10mo agoI 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.
- thethimble 10mo agoI 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.
- assemblyman 10mo agoI am a big fan of using LLMs although in my own limited way. I don't work at Meta and don't feel strongly about him leaving or staying there. It's possible that he will turn out to be correct in the long run. From his viewpoint, the primary goal is research and any usefulness of intermediate advances is maybe (speculating) "beneath him". If this is the case, I completely understand why a corporation would want to eject him. LeCun probably sees the pretty amazing developments since ChatGPT first came out as incremental hacks. I am neutral about this aspect too. Maybe they are but the hacks have been useful to me. Eventually this feels like the correction of a real misalignment between LeCun/FAIR and Meta. Hopefully now, they can both focus on what they are good at. I must admit that I have great sympathy for open-ended research but industry has always been fickle about it. That's where the government and universities are supposed to play a key role.
- assemblyman 10mo agoA 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.
- caminante 10mo agoPicking Schumacher, Einstein, others seems unfair as they were godlike, despite competition catching up and there are limited prime years for mathematicians/athletes. Luckey's a smart guy who would easily be on his way to millions, but got "lucky" into billions. Look closer. He committed IP theft for the tech he/Carmack sold to Facebook. He only had to pay a $50M fine in return for +$500M buyout/earnout. He's extra "lucky" because the fines and sanctions could've been a lot worse.
- hedayet 10mo agoTo 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"
- intalentive 10mo agoMeta does not want to make ambitious risky R&D bets without immediate payoff. They also canned their AR guy who wanted to build custom chips for wearables like Apple.
- nurettin 10mo agoHappy to see him retire to obscurity. What a run.