Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'

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.

That'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).

Meta hiring researchers en masse at $100m+ pay packages is fairly new, as of this summer.

I don't know if that's indicative of the market as a whole though. Zuck just seems really gutted they fell behind with Llama 4.

> Meta hiring researchers en masse at $100m+ pay packages is fairly new, as of this summer.

En masse? Wasn't it just a couple of outliers?