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.
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If you want to predict future text, you use an LLM. If you want to predict future frames in a video, you go with Diffusion. But what both of them lack is object permanence. If a car isn't visible in the input frame, it won't be visible in the output. But in the real world, there are A LOT of things that are invisible (image) or not mentioned but only implied (text) that still strongly affect the future. Every kid knows that when you roll a marble behind your hand, it'll come out on the other side. But LLMs and Diffusion models routinely fail to predict that, as for them the object disappears when it stops being visible.
Based on what I heard from others, world models are considered the missing ingredient for useful robots and self-driving cars. If that's halfway accurate, it would make sense to pour A LOT of money into world models, because they will unlock high-value products.
Messing with the logic in the loop and combining models has an enormous potential, but it's more engineering than researching, and it's just not the sort of work that LeCun is interested in. I think the conflict lies there, that Facebook is an engineering company, and a possible future of AI lies in AI engineering rather than AI research.
This is something that was true last year, but hanging on by a thread this year. Genie shows this off really well, but it's also in the video models as well.[1]
[1]https://storage.googleapis.com/gdm-deepmind-com-prod-public/...