8 ms·
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 groundbre
by sebmellen 1y ago
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.
- motbus3 1y agoZuck hired John Carmack and got nothing of it On the other hand, it was only lecunn avoiding meta to go 100p evil creepy mode too
- Tepix 1y agoCarmack laid the foundation for the all-in-one VR headsets.
- blitzar 1y agoHopefully one day, in a galaxy far far away, someone builds something on those foundations.
- slfnflctd 11mo agoYou joke, but the Star Wars games - especially the pinball one, for me at least - are some of the best experiences available on Quest headsets. I've been playing software pinball (as well as the real thing) since the 80s, and this is one of my favorite ways to do it now, which I will keep coming back to.
- lofaszvanitt 11mo agoAnd Carmack complained about the bureaucracy hell that is Facebook.
- LinuxAmbulance 11mo agoComing from a small company like iD, it must have been quite the shock.
- lofaszvanitt 11mo agoDoesn't matter. Maybe read the whole memo.
- huevosabio 1y agoYes, that was such a bizarre move.
- gnaman 1y agoHe is also not very interested in LLMs, and that seems to be Zuck's top priority.
- tinco 1y agoYeah I think LeCun is underestimating the impact that LLM's and Diffusion models are going to have, even considering the huge impact they're already having. That's no problem as I'm sure whatever LeCun is working on is going to be amazing as well, but an enterprise like Facebook can't have their top researcher work on risky things when there's surefire paths to success still available.
- raverbashing 1y agoYeah honestly I'm with the LLM people here If you think LLMs are not the future then you need to come with something better If you have a theoretical idea that's great, but take to at least GPT2 level first before writing off LLMs Theoretical people love coming up with "better ideas" that fall flat or have hidden gotchas when they get to practical implementation As Linus says, "talk is cheap, show me the code".
- dpe82 1y agoOf course the challenge with that is it's often not obvious until after quite a bit of work and refinement that something else is, in fact, better.
- DaSHacka 1y agoDo you? Or is it possible to acknowledge a plateau in innovation without necessarily having an immediate solution cooked-up and ready to go? Are all critiques of the obvious decline in physical durability of American-made products invalid unless they figure out a solution to the problem? Or may critics of a subject exist without necessarily being accredited engineers themselves?
- hhh 1y agoLLMs are the present. We will see what the future holds.
- enahs-sf 1y agoWould love to have been a fly on the wall during one of their 1:1’s.
- xuancanh 1y agoIn industry research, someone in a chief position like LeCun should know how to balance long-term research with short-term projects. However, for whatever reason, he consistently shows hostility toward LLMs and engineering projects, even though Llama and PyTorch are two of the most influential projects from Meta AI. His attitude doesn’t really match what is expected from a Chief position at a product company like Facebook. When Llama 4 got criticized, he distanced himself from the project, stating that he only leads FAIR and that the project falls under a different organization. That kind of attitude doesn’t seem suitable for the face of AI at the company. It's not a surprise that Zuck tried to demote him.
- throwaw12 1y agoI would pose a question differently, under his leadership did Meta achieve good outcome? If the answer is yes, then better to keep him, because he has already proved himself and you can win in the long-term. With Meta's pockets, you can always create a new department specifically for short-term projects. If the answer is no, then nothing to discuss here.
- rw2 1y agoI believe that the fact that Chinese models are beating the crap of of Llama means it's a huge no.
- amelius 1y agoWhy? The Chinese are very capable. Most DL papers have at least one Chinese name on it. That doesn't mean they are Chinese but it's telling.
- UrineSqueegee 1y agois an american model chinese because chinese people were in the team?
- 1y ago
- ACCount37 1y agoThat 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.
- dude250711 1y agoThere is someone else at Facebook who's pet projects do not get results...
- jb1991 1y agoWho are you referring to?
- nolok 1y agoI think he means Zuckerberg himself, the metaverse isn't exactly a major success, but this is a false equivalency the way he organized it only his vote matters he does what he wants
- ergocoder 1y agoIf you hire a house cleaner to clean your house, and the cleaner didn't do well, would you eject yourself out of the house? You would not. You would change to a new cleaner.
- psychoslave 11mo agoBut if we hire someone to deal on R&D to automate fully the house cleaning process, we might not necessarily expect the office to be maintained in clean state by the researchers themselves any time we enter the room.
- ergocoder 11mo agoAs far as an analogy, whatever happens, whoever messes up, Zuck, as the owner, of course, takes the final blame. That's why he is changing the team. Still, people bring up this weird point that would be equivalent to you giving up your house equity for free because you fucked up on hiring and managing your house.
- 7moritz7 1y agoWhen I first saw their LLM integration on Facebook I thought the screenshot was fake and a joke
- garyclarke27 1y agoZuck did this on purpose, humiliating LeCun so he would leave. Despite LeCun being proved wrong on LLMs capabilities such as reasoning, he remained extremely negative, not exactly inspiring leadership to the Meta Ai team, he had to go.
- aiven 1y agoBut LLMs still can't reason... in a reasonable sense. No matter how you look at it, it is still a statistical model that guesses next word, it doesn't think/reason per se.
- astrange 11mo agoIt does not guess the next word, the sampler chooses subword tokens. Your explanation can't even explain why it generates coherent words.
- levocardia 11mo agoIt is insane to think this in 2025 unless you define "reasoning" as "the thing I can do that LLMs cannot"
- ActorNightly 11mo agoReasoning is the act of figuring out how to solve a problem for which you have no previous training set. If an AI can reason, and you give it a standard task of "write me a python file that does x and y", it should be able to complete that task without ever being trained on python code. Or english in general. The way it would solve that problem would look more like some combination of Hebbian Learning and Mu Zero, where it starts to explore the space around it interms of interactions, information gathering, information parsing, forming associations, to where it eventually understands that your task involves the action of writing bytes to a file in a certain structure that when executed produces certain output, and the rules around the structure that make it give that output. And it will be able to do this through running as a model on your computer, or a robot that can type on a keyboard, all from the same code. LLMs appear to "reason" because most people don't actually reason - a lot of people even in technical fields operate on a principle of information lookup. I.e they look at the things that they have been taught to do, figure out which problem fits closest, and repeat steps with a few modifications a long the way. LLMs pretty much do the same thing. If you operate like this, then sure LLMs, "reason". But there is a reason why LLMs are barely useful in actual technical work - under the hood, to make them do things autonomously, you basically have to specify wrapper code/prompts that take often as long to write and finetune as actual code itself.
- ulfw 1y agoZuckerberg knows what he wants but he rarely knows how to get it. That's been his problem all along. Unlike others he isn't scared to throw ridiculous amounts of money at a problem though and buy companies who do things he can't get done himself.
- margorczynski 1y agoThere's also the aspect of control - because of how the shares and ownership are organized he answers essentially to no one. In other companies burning this much cash as was with VR or now AI without any sensible results would get him ejected a long time ago.
- sidcool 1y agoI won't be surprised if Musk hires him. But I hear LeCun hates the guts of Musk.
- ACCount37 1y agoMusk wants people who can deliver results, and fast. If LeCun can't cough up some research that's directly applicable to Grok or Optimus, Musk wouldn't want him.
- HarHarVeryFunny 11mo agoMusk doesn't appear interested in AI research - he's basically doing the same as Meta and just pursuing me-too SOTA LLMs and image generation at X.ai.
- mrguyorama 11mo agoMusk only cares about AI as far as it can be used to replace all sources of information with versions that will say whatever he wants and spout his worldview of the day. Musk cares about AI research as much as he cared about Path of Exile
- ergocoder 1y agoLeCun is great and smart, of course. But he had his chance. It didn't go that well. Now Zuck wants somebody else to try. Messi is the best footballer of our era. It doesn't mean he would play well in any team.
- jamesblonde 1y agoI don't think Messi could do it on a wet night in Stoke. Ronaldo could, though. /s
- esalman 11mo agoMessi would only play well in Barcelona. Lecunn can produce high quality research anywhere. It's not a great comparison.
- ergocoder 11mo agoIt's a great comparison, and we are on the same page. Zuck wants both great products and research. Lecunn is great at producing high quality research. So, Lecunn isn't quite a good fit at Facebook.
- esalman 11mo agoI agree, when you put it in product vs research context, it actually makes sense.
- torginus 1y agoWhat does Meta even want with AI? I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero. Which is impossible anyway - I facebook to maintain real human connections and keep up with people who I care about, not to consume infinite content.
- zamadatix 1y agoAt 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.
- b112 1y agoYou missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example. Would be very inline with the AI angle.
- breppp 1y agothey are out for your clicks and attention minutes if OpenAI can build a "social" network of completely generated content, that can kill Meta. Even today I venture to guess that most of the engagements in their platforms is not driven by real friends, so an AI driven platform won't be too different, or it might make content generation be so easy as to make your friends engage again. Apart from it the ludicrous vision of the metaverse seems much more plausible with highly realistic world models
- pandemic_region 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- archerx 1y agoMeta had John Carmack and squandered him. It seems like Meta can get amazing talent but has no idea how to get any value or potential out of them.
- FartyMcFarter 1y ago> But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models. When did they make groundbreaking foundation models though? DeepMind and OpenAI have done plenty of revolutionary things, what did Meta AI do while being led by LeCun?
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo ago> slopware Damn did you just invent that? That's really catchy.
- esafak 11mo agoSlop is already a noun.
- ninetyninenine 11mo agoIt wasn’t boneheaded. It was done to make Yann leave. Meta doesn’t want Yann for good reason. Yann was largely wrong about AI. Yann coined the term stochastic parrot and derrided LLMs as a dead end. It’s now utterly clear the amount of utility LLMs have and that whatever these LLMs are doing it is much more than stochastic parroting. I wouldn’t give money to Yann, the guy is a stubborn idiot and closed minded. Whatever he’s doing wont even touch LLM technology. He was so publicly deriding LLMs I see no way he will back pedal from that. I dont think LLMs are the end of the story for agi. But I think they are a stepping stone. Whatever agi is in the end, LLMs or something close to it will be a modular component of aspect of the final product. For LeCunn to dismiss even the possibility of this is idiotic. Horrible investment move to give money to Yann to likely pursue Agi without even considering LLMs.
- renegade-otter 11mo agoOh wow, is that true? They made him report to the directory of the Slop Factory? Brilliant!
- SilverElfin 11mo agoNo, it was because LeCun had no talent for running real life teams and was stuck in a weird place where he hated LLMs. He frankly was wasting Meta’s resources. And making him report to Wang was a way to force him out.
- FanaHOVA 11mo ago> not truly groundbreaking foundation models. Where is any proof that Yann LeCun is able to deliver that? He's had way more resources than any other lab during his tenure, and yet has nothing substantial to show for it.