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

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.

That 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.

I agree. I never understood LeCun's statement that we need to pivot toward the visual aspects of things because the bitrate of text is low while visual input through the eye is high.

Text and languages contain structured information and encode a lot of real-world complexity (or it's "modelling" that).

Not saying we won't pivot to visual data or world simulations, but he was clearly not the type of person to compete with other LLM research labs, nor did he propose any alternative that could be used to create something interesting for end-users.

Text and language contain only approximate information filtered through humans eyes and brains. Also animals don't have language and can show quite advanced capabilities compared to what we can currently do in robotics. And if you do enough mindfulness you can dissociate cognition/consciousness from language. I think we are lured because how important language is for us humans, but intuitively it's obvious to me language (and LLMs) are only a subcomponent, or even irrelevant for say self driving or robotics.