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).

You must not watch broadcast television (e.g American Football). Anthropic is doing a huge ad blitz, trying to get end customers to use their chatbot.

Anthropic, frankly, needs to in ways the other big names don't.

It gets lost on people in techcentric fields because Claude's at the forefront of things we care about, but Anthropic is basically unknown among the wider populace.

Last I'd looked a few months ago, Anthropic's brand awareness was in the middle single digits; OpenAI/ChatGPT was somewhere around 80% for comparison. MS/Copilot and Gemini were somewhere between the two but closer to Open AI than Anthropic.

tl;dr - Anthropic has a lot more to gain from awareness campaigns than the other major model providers do.

Anthropic feels like a one trick pony as most users dont need or want anthropic products.

However, I speak with a small subset of our most experienced engineers and they all love Claude Sonnet 4.5. Who knows if this lead will last.