Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own startup | Hacker News Reader

Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own startup

ft.com

62 pointsgeordee15 comments

It was obvious that there would be no space for Yann LeCun after Alexandr Wang came in. He was probably just waiting for the best time to leave.

I cannot judge his research output at Meta but he failed pretty bad at the LLM race. Since so many other organizations succeeded at creating open source models of far higher quality at much lower cost, it would be instructive to understand what exactly went wrong there.

Curious about how much risk Meta leadership was comfortable with when they decided to layer Yann. Perhaps the winds of open research were already blowing a different direction at the company, and he had already indicated that he wanted to leave as a result of that. We can only guess.

Kind of hilarious to me to consider him "failing" with LLMs. Given his remit was a research time horizon of 8-10 years, and the fact that he's gone on record saying that he expects the technology will stall out in the time horizon, it seems he can only take Ws and ties. Indirect influence on open-sourcing the models to propel research forward (which is pretty important for a chief scientist) which added benefit for Meta's other products.

> I cannot judge his research output at Meta but he failed pretty bad at the LLM race. Since so many other organizations succeeded at creating open source models of far higher quality at much lower cost, it would be instructive to understand what exactly went wrong there.

What? Until the Chinese jumped in Llama was the premium open source model. The reason that the Chinese were successful at MOE was just that they were limited with chips and had to think outside the box. US labs are operating on the power law. They also, arguably, distilled from western models (llama).

> he failed pretty bad at the LLM race

Was he even involved in this?

Did they even fail? Llama2 was groundbreaking for open source LLMs, it defined the entire space. Llama3 was a major improvement over Llama2. Just because Llama4 was underwhelming, it's silly to say they failed.

Any exponential growth is failing in a market which demands superexponential growth

No, he said that he was not involved. He had his own research model to develop, his startup will probably continue his work there but I wonder if he thinks its viable in the short term since he's launching a startup. I thought it was a moonshot.

I wonder if it means Meta will move away from their OSS commitment. Wasn't it largely pushed by LeCun?

Yes, it was

Good for him. No one has done as much damage to AR/VR as FB did to it with the Metaverse. Way to make something cool fundamentally unlikable.

I would actually put a lot of the blame for today's VR winter (or at least expectations cooldown) on Ready Player One, and particularly its movie adaptation. Not that it was bad per-se, but for me and others I spoke too it was so outlandish that it essentially made VR "jump the shark".

I would put it on VR having a grand total of 3 good applications: HL Alyx, VRChat and Beat Saber, one of which was doing the metaverse better than Facebook, and on a shoestring budget.

(I forgot sims).

Besides I wonder what does a company, whose entire product lineup revolves around looking cool and successful and admired in front of strangers with a product whose main mode of usage involves blindly flailing around in a room with a plastic box stripped to your face.

HL Alyx ruined most VR games for me because they never lived up to Half-Life, and no one but Valve could make such a high-profile game. VR is a genre that benefits A LOT from high budgets.

I enjoyed games like No Man's Sky in VR, but they just don't hit the same high notes.

Throw simming in there, too.

I've gotta know which side of Poe's law this falls on.

Was this written in earnest or as an ironic/facetious joke?

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