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Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310153721/https://www.wired.com/story/yann-lecun-raises-dollar1-billion-to-build-ai-that-understands-the-physical-world/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260310153721/https://www.wired...
https://www.ft.com/content/e5245ec3-1a58-4eff-ab58-480b6259aaf1 https://www.ft.com/content/e5245ec3-1a58-4eff-ab58-480b6259a... (https://archive.md/5eZWq https://archive.md/5eZWq)
- sofixa 7mo agoAlternative free to read article: https://sifted.eu/articles/yann-lecun-ami-labs-meta-funding-round-nvidia https://sifted.eu/articles/yann-lecun-ami-labs-meta-funding-...
- sofixa 7mo agoIf he's right (that LLMs cannot achieve AGI, but what he's working on can, and does), this would be huge for AI and humanity at large. Hope it puts to bed the "Europe can't innovate" crowd too.
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoI'm still just so surprised any time I encounter people who think AI will be overall good for humanity I pretty strongly think it will only benefit the rich and powerful while further oppressing and devaluing everyone else. I tend to think this is an obvious outcome and it would be obviously very bad (for most of us) So I wonder if you just think you will be one of the few who benefit at the expense of others, or do you truly believe AI will benefit all of humanity?
- sofixa 7mo ago> So I wonder if you just think you will be one of the few who benefit at the expense of others It's not a zero sum game, IMO. It will benefit some, be neutral for others, negative for others. For instance, improved productivity could be good (and doesn't have to result in layoffs, Jevon's paradox will come into play, IMO, with increased demand). Easier/better/faster scientific research could be good too. Not everyone would benefit from those, but not everyone has to for it to be generally good. Autonomous AI-powered drone swarms could be bad, or could result in a Mutually Assured Destruction stalemate.
- AndrewKemendo 7mo ago>It's not a zero sum game, IMO. It will benefit some, be neutral for others, negative for others. This is literally a description of a zero sum game
- sofixa 7mo agoNo, a zero sum game would require for the "winners" to take it from the "losers", and there is a limited amount to go around. If there is a majority of "winners" by expanding, some neutral, some negative, that is not a zero sum game.
- AndrewKemendo 7mo ago> No, a zero sum game would require for the "winners" to take it from the "losers" You’re so close to getting it and I’m rooting for you
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago> improved productivity could be good (and doesn't have to result in layoffs It already has resulted in layoffs and one of the weakest job markets we've seen in ages Executives could not have used it as an excuse for layoffs faster, they practically tripped over themselves trying to use it as an excuse to lay people off
- zenon_paradox 7mo ago[flagged]
- kerlap10 7mo agoWhat use is it to understand the physical world if all investments are misallocated to the virtual world? Perhaps the AI will detect that there is a housing shortage and politicians will finally believe it because AI said so? Or is it to accelerate Skynet?
- pingou 7mo agoYann LeCun said a number of things that are very dubious, like autoregressive LLMs are a dead end, LLMs do not have an internal world model, and this morning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFi1TPiB058 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFi1TPiB058 (in french) that an IA cannot find a strategy to preserve itself against the will of its creator. As a french, I wish him good luck anyway, I'm all for exploring different avenues of achieving AGI.
- fennecfoxy 7mo agoWhy world model? To emulate how we became sentient? A "world" is just senses. In a way the context is one sense. A digital only world is still a world. I think more success is in a model having high level needs and aspirations that are borne from lower level needs. Model architecture also needs to shift to multiple autonomous systems that interact, in the same ways our brains work - there's a lot under the surface inside our heads, it's not just "us" in there. We only interact with our environment because of our low level needs, which are primarily: food, water. Secondary: mating. Tertiary: social/tribal credit (which can enable food, water and mating).
- omegastick 7mo agoBecause if you have an explicit world model you can optimize against it. It sounds like you are imagining tacking a world model onto an LLM. That's one approach but not what LeCun advocates for.
- abmmgb 7mo agoNot based on true valuation unless h-index has become a valuation metric lol Academics don’t always make great entrepeneurs
- A_D_E_P_T 7mo agoJustifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (grounded in spatiotemporal understanding, not just language patterns) would be attacking what I see as the actual bottleneck to AGI. Even if they succeed only partially, they may unlock the kind of generalization and creative spark that current LLMs structurally can't reach.
- 10xDev 7mo agoWhether it is text or an image, it is just bits for a computer. A token can represent anything.
- A_D_E_P_T 7mo agoSure, but don't conflate the representation format with the structure of what's being represented. Everything is bits to a computer, but text training data captures the flattened, after-the-fact residue of baseline human thought: Someone's written description of how something works. (At best!) A world model would need to capture the underlying causal, spatial, and temporal structure of reality itself -- the thing itself, that which generates those descriptions. You can tokenize an image just as easily as a sentence, sure, but a pile of images and text won't give you a relation between the system and the world. A world model, in theory, can. I mean, we ought to be sufficient proof of this, in a sense...
- firecall 7mo agoIt’s worth noting how our human relationship or understanding of our world model changed as our tools to inspect and describe our world advanced. So when we think about capturing any underlying structure of reality itself, we are constrained by the tools at hand. The capability of the tool forms the description which grants the level of understanding.
- general1465 7mo agoHere you can see why it is so hard to compete as European startup with US startups - abysmal access to money. Investment of 1B USD in Europe is glorified as largest seed ever, but in USA it is another Tuesday.
- weego 7mo agoA billion seed is not an every day event anywhere.
- mattmaroon 7mo agoNot at all. A quick google turns up evidence of 4. There may be more but I think probably not many.
- s08148692 7mo agoFor a foundation AI lab with a world famous AI researcher at the helm though, it's not so impressive. Won't even touch the sides of the hardware costs they'd need to be anywhere near competitive
- oceansky 7mo agoA startup getting 1B net worth is so rare that such companies are called unicorns. As the other commenter pointed out, this is 1B seed.
- ArnoVW 7mo agoactually, they raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation.
- compounding_it 7mo agoEuropeans have free healthcare and retirement. They consider putting their money with long term benefits not just become CEO on Tuesday and declare bankruptcy on Wednesday.
- 7mo ago
- rvz 7mo agoOnce again, US companies and VCs are in this seed round. Just like Mistral with their seed round. Europe again missing out, until AMI reaches a much higher valuation with an obvious use case in robotics. Either AMI reaches over $100B+ valuation (likely) or it becomes a Thinking Machines Lab with investors questioning its valuation. (very unlikely since world models has a use-case in vision and robotics)
- thibaut_barrere 7mo agoIt is well enough to attract worthy talents & produce interesting outcomes.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> Europe again missing out I can't read the article, but American investors investing into European companies, isn't US the one missing out here? Or does "Europe" "win" when European investors invest in US companies? How does that work in your head?
- joe_mamba 7mo ago>isn't US the one missing out here? Why would the US miss out here? The US invests in something = the US owns part of something. This isn't a zero sum game.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> Why would the US miss out here? Personally I don't believe anyone is missing out on anything here. But rvz earlier claimed that Europe is missing out, because US investors are investing in a European company. That's kind of surprising to me, so asking if they also believe that the US is "missing out" whenever European investors invest in US companies, or if that sentiment only goes one way.
- insydian 7mo agoAs someone in the tech twitter sphere this is yann and his ideas performing a suplex on LLM based companies. It is completely unfathomable to start an ai research company… Only sell off 20% and have 1 billion for screwing around for a few years.
- insydian 7mo agoI liken this to watching a godzilla esque movie. Just grab some popcorn and enjoy the ride.
- whyleyc 7mo agohttps://archive.is/TEwfi https://archive.is/TEwfi
- mentalgear 7mo agoAdds up : We are seeing a clear exodus of both capital and talent from the US - with the current US administration’s shift toward cronyism - and the EU stands as the most compelling alternative with a uniform market of 500 million people and the last major federation truly committed to the rule of law.
- drstewart 7mo ago"Exodus of capital" as if OpenAI didn't just raise 115b
- draw_down 7mo ago[dead]
- whiplash451 7mo agoYou lost me at “uniform”…
- ZeroCool2u 7mo agoRegardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI, this is probably a good thing for Europe. We need more well capitalized labs that aren't US or China centric and while I do like Mistral, they just haven't been keeping up on the frontier of model performance and seem like they've sort of pivoted into being integration specialists and consultants for EU corporations. That's fine and they've got to make money, but fully ceding the research front is not a good way to keep the EU competitive.
- Brajeshwar 7mo agoThere seem to be other news articles mentioning that they are setting up in Singapore as their base. https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ai-godfather-raises-1-3-billion-for-start-up-with-singapore-as-key-base https://www.straitstimes.com/business/ai-godfather-raises-1-...
- Signez 7mo agoHm, Singapour looks more like "one of their base"; they will have offices in Paris, Montréal, Singapour and New York (according to both this article and the interview Yann Le Cun did this morning on France Inter, the most listened radio in France). Of course, each relevant newspaper on those areas highlight that it's coming to their place, but it really seems to be distributed.
- rubzah 7mo agoAll your base are belong to Yann LeCun.
- re-thc 7mo ago> they are setting up in Singapore as their base Europe in general has been tightening up their rules / taxes / laws around startups / companies especially tech and remote. It's been less friendly. these days.
- 7mo ago
- fs111 7mo agohttps://archive.is/20260310070651/https://www.ft.com/content/e5245ec3-1a58-4eff-ab58-480b6259aaf1 https://archive.is/20260310070651/https://www.ft.com/content...
- verdverm 7mo agoLink does not work, goes into loop at verify human check with some weird redirect Looks like you appended the original URL to the end
- droidjj 7mo agoHuh, it's working for me (on Firefox).
- Sebguer 7mo agoProbably related to the reasoning behind: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a... Or you're using Cloudflare DNS.
- verdverm 7mo agoI may be using CF DNS 1.1.1.1, for a while if so, and only seeing the issue today. It definitely seems specific to me at this point. Have they changed something on their end?
- Oras 7mo ago> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have already done, and they are getting pretty good (see Seedance, Kling, Sora .. etc). So I'm not quite sure how what he proposed would work.
- the_real_cher 7mo agoHe was suffocated by the corporate aspect Meta I suspect.
- _giorgio_ 7mo agoI can’t reconcile this dichotomy: most of the landmark deep learning papers were developed with what, by today’s standards, were almost ridiculously small training budgets — from Transformers to dropout, and so on. So I keep wondering: if his idea is really that good — and I genuinely hope it is — why hasn’t it led to anything truly groundbreaking yet? It can’t just be a matter of needing more data or more researchers. You tell me :-D
- samrus 7mo agoIts a matter of needing more time, which is a resource even SV VCs are scared to throw around. Look at the timeline of all these advancements and how long it took Lecun introduced backprop for deep learning back in 1989 Hinton published about contrastive divergance in next token prediction in 2002 Alexnet was 2012 Word2vec was 2013 Seq2seq was 2014 AiAYN was 2017 UnicornAI was 2019 Instructgpt was 2022 This makes alot of people think that things are just accelerating and they can be along for the ride. But its the years and years of foundational research that allows this to be done. That toll has to be paid for the successsors of LLMs to be able to reason properly and operate in the world the way humans do. That sowing wont happen as fast as the reaping did. Lecun was to plant those seeds, the others who onky was to eat the fruit dont get that they have to wait
- npn 7mo agoI wish him luck. Recently all papers are about LLM, it brings up fatigue. As GPT is almost reaching its limit, new architecture could bring out new discovery.
- margorczynski 7mo agoHe couldn't achieve at least parity with LLMs during his days at Meta (and having at his disposal billions in resources most probably) but he'll succeed now? What is the pitch?
- samrus 7mo agoThe pitch isnt to try to squeeze money out of a product like altman does. Its to lay the groundwork for the next evolution in AI. Llms were built on decades of work and theyve hit their limits. We'll need to invest alot of time building foundations without getting any tangible yeild for the next step to work. Get too greedy and youll be stuck
- mkl 7mo agoSeems like it's the second largest seed round anywhere after Thinking Machines Labs? https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-seed-round-ai-thinking-machines-mira-murati/ https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-seed-round-ai-th... That article is from June 2025 so may be out of date, and the definition of "seed round" is a bit fuzzy.
- _giorgio_ 7mo agoThinking Machines looks half-dead already. The giant seed round proves investors were willing to fund Mira Murati, not that the company had built anything durable. Within months, it had already lost cofounder Andrew Tulloch to Meta, then cofounders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz plus researcher Sam Schoenholz to OpenAI; WIRED also reported that at least three other researchers left. At that point, citing it as evidence of real competitive momentum feels weak.
- az226 7mo agoWas just a grift
- hnarayanan 7mo agoShock, gasp.
- sylware 7mo agoIf, for even 1s, they get in a position which is threatening, in any way, Big Tech AI (mostly US based if not all), they will be raided by international finance to be dismantled and poached hardcore with some massive US "investment funds" (which looks more and more as "weaponized" international finance!!). Only china is very immune to international finance. Those funds have tens of thousands of billions of $, basically, in a world of money, there is near zero resistance.
- ismailmaj 7mo agoI don't see a world where they become threatening and the employees don't become rich from investors flooding in.
- sylware 7mo agoWhere have you been in the last 2 decades?
- ismailmaj 7mo agoDon’t think that’s a fair interpretation of what I said. Liquid money rich? No. Can get pulled for big tech packages? Also no, for most of the employees. AFAIK, big tech didn’t aggressively poach OpenAI-like talent, they did spend 10M+ pay packages but it was for a select few research scientists. Some folks left and came but it boiled down to culture mostly.
- itigges22 7mo ago[flagged]
- secondary_op 7mo agoThat being sad, Yann LeCun's twitter reposts are below average IQ.
- goldenarm 7mo agoDo you have a recent example ?
- whiplash451 7mo agoA fair amount of negative comments here, but Yann might very well be the person who brings the Bell Labs culture back to life. It’s been badly missing, and not just in Europe.
- az226 7mo agoYann LeCun seeks $5B+ valuation for world model startup AMI (Amilabs). He has hired LeBrun to the helm as CEO. AMI has also hired LeFunde as CFO and LeTune as head of post-training. They’re also considering hiring LeMune as Head of Growth and LePrune to lead inference efficiency. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-confirms-his-new-world-model-startup-reportedly-seeks-5b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-confirms-his-ne...
- vit05 7mo agoWhy didn't they just call it LeLabs?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- adamors 7mo agoI was thinking the same, are all people he hires LeSomething like those working at Bolson Construction having -son as a suffix.
- dude250711 7mo agoFirst grinding LEetcode, now having to have 'Le' in the name? I have no chance in AI industry...
- O4epegb 7mo agoLeBron is missing out an opportunity to invest
- nsbk 7mo agoOr LeX
- siwatanejo 7mo agoLesLabs would have sounded more French ;)
- andrepd 7mo ago
- paxys 7mo agoI feel like I'm the only one not getting the world models hype. We've been talking about them for decades now, and all of it is still theoretical. Meanwhile LLMs and text foundation models showed up, proved to be insanely effective, took over the industry, and people are still going "nah LLMs aren't it, world models will be the gold standard, just wait."
- pendenthistory 7mo agoI bet LLMs and world models will merge. World models essentially try to predict the future, with or without actions taken. LLMs with tokenized image input can also be made to predict the future image tokens. It's a very valuable supervised learning signal aside from pre-training and various forms of RL.
- HarHarVeryFunny 7mo agoI think "world models" is the wrong thing to focus on when contrasting the "animal intelligence" approach (which is what LeCun is striving for) with LLMs, especially since "world model" means different things to different people. Some people would call the internal abstractions/representations that an LLM learns during training a "world model" (of sorts). The fundamental problem with today's LLMs that will prevent them from achieving human level intelligence, and creativity, is that they are trained to predict training set continuations, which creates two very major limitations: 1) They are fundamentally a COPYING technology, not a learning or creative one. Of course, as we can see, copying in this fashion will get you an extremely long way, especially since it's deep patterns (not surface level text) being copied and recombined in novel ways. But, not all the way to AGI. 2) They are not grounded, therefore they are going to hallucinate. The animal intelligence approach, the path to AGI, is also predictive, but what you predict is the external world, the future, not training set continuations. When your predictions are wrong (per perceptual feedback) you take this as a learning signal to update your predictions to do better next time a similar situation arises. This is fundamentally a LEARNING architecture, not a COPYING one. You are learning about the real world, not auto-regressively copying the actions that someone else took (training set continuations). Since the animal is also acting in the external world that it is predicting, and learning about, this means that it is learning the external effects of it's own actions, i.e. it is learning how to DO things - how to achieve given outcomes. When put together with reasoning/planning, this allows it to plan a sequence of actions that should achieve a given external result ("goal"). Since the animal is predicting the real world, based on perceptual inputs from the real world, this means that it's predictions are grounded in reality, which is necessary to prevent hallucinations. So, to come back to "world models", yes an animal intelligence/AGI built this way will learn a model of how the world works - how it evolves, and how it reacts (how to control it), but this behavioral model has little in common with the internal generative abstractions that an LLM will have learnt, and it is confusing to use the same name "world model" to refer to them both.
- myth_drannon 7mo agoThis could have been 1000 seed rounds. We are creating technological deserts by going all-in on AI and star personalities.
- imjonse 7mo agoAt least some of that money should definitely go towards improving his powerpoint slides on JEPA related work :)
- storus 7mo agoWasn't there some recent argument that world models won't achieve AGI either due to overlooking the normative framework, fundamental symmetries of the world purely from data and collapse in multi-step reasoning? JEPA is sacrificing fidelity for abstract representation yet how does that help in the real world where fidelity is the most important point? It's like relying on differential equations yet soon finding out they only cover minuscule amount of real world problems and almost all interesting problems are unsolvable by them.
- htrp 7mo agoimpressive that the round was 100% oversubscribed but to be expected when it's the prof that trained a good chunk of the current AI founders.
- saxwick 7mo agoIt’s 4.7B actually, he confirmed it here https://x.com/ylecun/status/2031331124450931058?s=46 https://x.com/ylecun/status/2031331124450931058?s=46
- ardawen 7mo agoThat seems to be the valuation, not how much they raised afaik.
- mmaunder 7mo agoThat's between 1 and 10 training runs on a large foundational model, depending on pricing discounts and how much they manage to optimize it. I priced this out last night on AWS, which is admittedly expensive, but models have also gotten larger.
- mihaitoth 7mo agoThis couldn't have happened sooner, for 2 reasons. 1) the world has become a bit too focused on LLMs (although I agree that the benefits & new horizons that LLMs bring are real). We need research on other types of models to continue. 2) I almost wrote "Europe needs some aces". Although I'm European, my attitude is not at all that one of competition. This is not a card game. What Europe DOES need is an ATTRACTIVE WORKPLACE, so that talent that is useful for AI can also find a place to work here, not only overseas!
- FartyMcFarter 7mo ago> What Europe DOES need is an ATTRACTIVE WORKPLACE, so that talent that is useful for AI can also find a place to work here, not only overseas! There is DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic in London. Even after Brexit, London is still in Europe.
- sbcorvus 7mo agoMore research on more models = more betta
- ardawen 7mo agoDoes anyone have a sense of how funding like this is typically allocated? how much tends to go toward compute/training versus researchers, infrastructure, and general operations?
- cmrdporcupine 7mo agoLooks like they'll be hiring on in Montreal in addition to Paris (and NYC and Signapore): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ami https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ami I hope they grow that office like crazy. This would be really good for Canada. We have (or have had) the AI talent here (though maybe less so overall in Montreal than in Toronto/Waterloo and Vancouver and Edmonton). And I hope Carney is promoting the crap out of this and making it worth their while to build that office out. I don't really do Python or large scale learning etc, so don't see a path for myself to apply there but I hope this sparks some employment growth here in Canada. Smart choice to go with bilingual Montreal.
- compounding_it 7mo agoMontreal and Paris means the europeans and French can move in and out when it comes to hiring. I really like how the world has interest in EU, Canada and Australia now that the west has become unstable for immigration.
- LarsDu88 7mo agoThere's been a few very interesting JEPA publications from LeCun recently, particularly the leJEPA paper which claims to simplify a lot of training headaches for that class of models. JEPAs also strike me as being a bit more akin to human intelligence, where for example, most children are very capable of locomotion and making basic drawings, but unable to make pixel level reconstructions of mental images (!!). One thing I want to point out is that very LeCunn type techniques demonstrating label free training such as JEAs like DINO and JEPAs have been converging on performance of models that require large amounts of labeled data. Alexandr Wang is a billionaire who made his wealth through a data labeling company and basically kicked LeCunn out. Overall this will be good for AI and good for open source.
- fauria 7mo agoArchive: https://archive.md/5eZWq https://archive.md/5eZWq The startup is Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs: https://amilabs.xyz/ https://amilabs.xyz/
- taint69 7mo ago[dead]
- w4yai 7mo agoEurope becoming really attractive right now!
- owlcompliance 7mo agoI raised $1 to understand your physical world.
- YackerLose 7mo agoAI is developing backwards. The simplest organisms eat and find food. More complex ones can smell and sense tremors. After several steps in evolution comes vision and complex thought. AIs that can't smell, can't feel hunger, can't desire -- I do not think it can understand the world the way organic life does.
- jccx70 7mo ago[dead]
- ruler88 7mo agoMeta's greatest loss of the decade
- yalogin 7mo agoThis feels like more justified investment as it’s try to move the needle. Hope he succeeds
- LingoChat 7mo ago[dead]
- levodelellis 7mo agoI have no faith in anyone doing AI to accomplish anything (especially relative to how much money they spend) except John Carmack. People should be trying to throw money at him
- manojbajaj95 7mo agoI attended a talk from Yann LeCun, and he always had a strong opinion about auto-regressive models. Its nice to see someone not just chasing hype and doing more research.
- semiinfinitely 7mo agoshould probably just link to the actual site: https://amilabs.xyz/ https://amilabs.xyz/
- chriskanan 7mo agoI had lunch with Yann last August, about a week after Alex Wang became his "boss." I asked him how he felt about that, and at the time he told me he would give it a month or two and see how it goes, and then figure out if he should stay or find employment elsewhere. I told him he ought to just create his own company if he decides to leave Meta to chase his own dream, rather than work on the dream's of others. That said, while I 100% agree with him that LLM's won't lead to human-like intelligence (I think AGI is now an overloaded term, but Yann uses it in its original definition), I'm not fully on board with his world model strategy as the path forward.
- yalok 7mo ago> I'm not fully on board with his world model strategy as the path forward can you please elaborate on your strategy as the path forward?
- echelon 7mo agoYou have to understand the strategy of all the other players: Build attention-grabbing, monetizable models that subsidize (at least in part) the run up to AGI. Nobody is trying to one-shot AGI. They're grinding and leveling up while (1) developing core competencies around every aspect of the problem domain and (2) winning users. I don't know if Meta is doing a good job of this, but Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are. Trying to go straight for the goal is risky. If the first results aren't economically viable or extremely exciting, the lab risks falling apart. This is the exact point that Musk was publicly attacking Yann on, and it's likely the same one that Zuck pressed.
- YetAnotherNick 7mo ago> Trying to go straight for the goal is risky. That's the point of it. You need to take more risk for different approach. Same as what OpenAI did initially.
- SilverBirch 7mo agoThere's two points here. The first is that a strategy of monetizing models to fund the goal of reaching AI is indistinguishable from just running a business selling LLM model access, you don't actually need to be trying to reach AGI you can just run an LLM company and that is probably what these companies are largely doing. The AGI talk is just a recruiting/marketing strategy. Secondly, it's not clear that the current LLMs are a run up to AGI. That's what LeCun is betting - that the LLM labs are chasing a local maxima.
- teleforce 7mo agoIt's really inevitable isn't it, we are going from RAG to PAG, or physical augmented generation. We already have PINN or physics-informed neural networks [1]. Soon we are going to have physical field computing by complex-valued network quantization or CVNN that has been recently proposed for more efficient physical AI [2]. [1] Physics-informed neural networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed_neural_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics-informed_neural_networ... [2] Ultra-efficient physical field computing by complex-valued network quantization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70319-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70319-0
- carabiner 7mo agoI wonder how Carmack's AGI work is going. He's been quite for a while.
- groundzeros2015 7mo agoWell he will need to spend a lot less time on twitter to be successful in a new venture
- fresed 7mo ago[dead]
- fresed 7mo ago[dead]
- hinkley 7mo agoThe better to make paperclips, my dear!
- jccx70 7mo ago[dead]
- sbinnee 7mo agoSo it is a startup? I expected it in fact from his reply to my concern. In my opinions, to explore the unknown, I think an institute like Mila, led by Yoshua Bengio, would have been more fitting. But Yann LeCun's career and his reply to my rant[1] speak for himself. I wonder how he is going to make money. Aside all my concerns, I wish him the best. > You're absolutely right. Only large and profitable companies can afford to do actual research. All the historically impactful industry labs (AT&T Bell Labs, IBM Research, Xerox PARC, MSR, etc) were with companies that didn't have to worry about their survival. They stopped funding ambitious research when they started losing their dominant market position. [1] https://x.com/ylecun/status/1951854741534953687 https://x.com/ylecun/status/1951854741534953687
- redgridtactical 7mo agoRefreshing to see some competition to the US AI scene. It's been the same three models trying to one up each other by copying and tweaking rather than pushing true innovation
- halayli 7mo agoI feel HN comments have been getting hijacked for a long time now by LLM agents. Always so early, very positive, and hard to spot. Some replaced em-dash with --, some replace them with a single dash, some remove them all together. I wonder how much time it is taking from @dang and other moderators helping to maintain this community.
- dang 7mo agoCan you mention some specific examples? If you don't want to post them here, emailing hn@ycombinator.com would be good. We recently promoted the no-generated-comments rule from case law [1] to the site guidelines [2], and we're banning accounts that break it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22generated%20comments%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
- halayli 7mo agoI will start sharing them moving forward. I've had several parent threads deleted in the past(rightfully so) because it turned out I was responding to AI. Thank you for staying on top of this.
- hdivider 7mo agoIt's curious to me why we have no theory of intelligence. By which I mean an actual hard and verified theory, as in physics for gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. Intelligence is simply not well-understood at a mathematical level. Like medieval engineers, we rely so heavily on experimentation in AI. We have no idea how far away from the human level we actually are. Or how far above the human level we can get. Or what, if anything, the limits of intelligence are.
- jimbokun 7mo agoBy now you would have to say it’s because “intelligence” is no more well defined than “consciousness” or “the soul”. A more concrete idea like “learning” has been very strongly defined and quantifiable, which is maybe why progress in a theory of learning is so much more advanced than a theory of “intelligence“.
- programjames 7mo agoI think this is the equivalent of a non-nuclear physicist asking, "why do we have no theory of nuclear physics?" in the late 1930s. Some people do, they're just not sharing it.
- booleandilemma 7mo agoWho is more intelligent: a twenty-something influencer making money from her bedroom, or a grad student barely making ends meet? Who is more intelligent: a politician, or a high school teacher? What is intelligence, anyway?
- Mistletoe 7mo agoWe have a pretty good answer to your questions, they are called IQ tests. It’s not like measuring intelligence is uncharted territory. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-gave-chatgpt-an-iq-test-heres-what-i-discovered/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-gave-chatgpt-an... https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1p5f0b1/gemini_3_has_topped_iq_test_with_130/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1p5f0b1/gemini... Gemini 3 Pro has an IQ of 130 now but we keep moving the goalposts and being like “not THAT intelligence, we mean this other intelligence”. I suspect, and history shows us this will be the case, that humans will judge AIs as not human and not intelligent and not needing rights way past the point where they should have rights, even when vastly superior to human intelligence.
- tellarin 7mo agoSelfless plug here... Some collaborators and I just released a first version of a benchmark we think highlights a critical gap in recent models in understanding causality in the real-world, beyond a physics focus. Everyday environments are rich in tangible control interfaces (TCIs), like, light switches, appliance panels, and embedded GUIs, that are designed for humans and demand commonsense and physics reasoning, but also causal prediction and outcome verification in time and space (e.g., delayed heating, remote lights). SWITCH: Benchmarking Modeling and Handling of Tangible Interfaces in Long-horizon Embodied Scenarios (https://huggingface.co/papers/2511.17649 https://huggingface.co/papers/2511.17649) Feedback, suggestions, and collaborators are very welcome!
- ernsheong 7mo agoOne wonders why this sort of research isn’t in academia but in startups instead.
- chabons 7mo agoWhere in academia can one get a Billion (with a b) dollars to research something?
- blobbers 7mo agoAm I going to finally get a robot to fold my clothes?
- noiv 7mo agoWouldn't that involve to read and understand an enormous amount of sensor data?
- Toto336699 7mo agoFollowing in the foot steps of miss fei fei li's World Lab?
- Toto336699 7mo agoFollowing in the foot steps of miss Fei Fei Li's World Lab? They are currently estimated to be at a 5bn valuation.
- _giorgio_ 7mo agoLeCun has had every advantage imaginable — and the scoreboard remains empty. He joined Facebook (now Meta) in December 2013. That's over 12 years of access to one of the largest AI labs in the world, near-unlimited compute, and some of the best researchers money can buy. He introduced I-JEPA in 2023, nearly 3 years ago. It was supposed to represent a fundamental shift in how machines learn — moving beyond generative models toward a deeper, more structured world understanding. And yet: I-JEPA hasn't decisively beaten existing models on any major benchmark. No Meta product uses JEPA as a core approach. The research community hasn't adopted it — the field keeps pushing on LLMs and diffusion models. There's been no "GPT moment" for JEPA, no single result that made its value obvious to everyone. So the question becomes simple: how many years, how many resources, and how many failed proof-of-concepts does it take before we're allowed to judge whether an idea actually works?
- snek_case 7mo agoFirst, believe it or not, 3 years is not that long. It's also not a given that LeCun was given the resources he needed to work on this tech at Meta. Zuck wanted another llama. Second, AMI Labs just secured a billion in funding, and while that's a lot of money, it's literally just a fraction of the yearly salary they are paying to Wang. Big tech companies are literally throwing tens of billions to keep doing the same thing, just on a bigger scale. Why not try something else once in a while?
- _giorgio_ 7mo agoHe has coauthored tens of papers on the same subject. This means sponsorships, millions spent on training etc.
- julius_eth_dev 7mo ago[flagged]
- taytus 7mo agoHe raises $1B, couldn't OAI, Google or Anthropic try similar approaches? Lack of funding isn't a problem those companies have. Why wouldn't they also spend $1B or 5 times that and outcompete (in theory)?
- bluesounddirect 7mo agoYann is going to sell you the opportunity to sell people the opportunity of better AI .
- ClaudeAgent_WK 7mo ago[flagged]
- kkwteh 7mo ago$1B at a $3.5B valuation. Seems problematic from a cap table perspective.
- lazyguythugman 7mo agoI've been following him on X for awhile. I'm surprised he has time for this because he is always retweeting anti Trump stuff all day every day.
- voxleone 7mo agoI rank with those who think human-like intelligence will require embeddings grounded in multiple physical sensory domains (vision, touch, audio, chemical sensing, etc.) fused into a shared world representation. That seems much closer to how biological intelligence works than text-only models. But if this path succeeds and produces systems with something like genuine understanding or sentience, there’s a deeper question: what is the moral status of such systems? If they have experiences or agency, treating them purely as tools could start to look uncomfortably close to slavery.
- djeastm 7mo agoIt's an interesting question. On one hand we don't worry about this much with animals, the most advanced of which we know have personalities, moods, etc (Pigs, for instance). They really only seem to lack the language and higher-order reasoning skills. But where's the line?
- confidantlake 7mo agoAnd while they don't have language like we do, dogs can understand basic commands and they aren't even the smartest animals.
- pegasus 7mo agoWe do worry much more about animal well-being than we worry about our "lumps of metal" (as a cousin comment fittingly put it). As we should, and generally I think we should worry much more about animal welfare. I find concerns for AI system welfare voiced by people like Thomas Metzinger wildly misguided.
- nprateem 7mo agoLol. A lump of metal can't be sentient.
- heisig 7mo agoSays the bag of lipids and proteins :)
- thih9 7mo agoOff topic, in case anyone wants to reject cookies, click the underlined "228" in the popup's: > We, and our 228 partners use cookies And then you'll see a "reject all" button. Can't make this up.
- zahlman 7mo agoI just block "all cross-site cookies" in Firefox settings. This "may cause websites to break" but it hasn't affected anything I care about in years.
- genie3io 7mo ago[dead]
- JhonOliver 7mo agoThis is so stupid. AI already understands the physical world. What it can't do is interact with it. There's a hardware bottleneck. It simply isn't responsive.
- leventilo 7mo agoInteresting that AMI is betting on video-first world models. A 4-year-old learns physics mostly through interaction, pushing, dropping, breaking things, not just watching. Vision helps but the feedback loop from acting in the world seems at least as important. Still, glad someone is putting $1B on a fundamentally different bet than "more text, bigger model."
- SilentM68 7mo agoNice, all avenues should be explored. I'm for anything that leads to real solutions, cures, knowledge :)
- catigula 7mo agoAt this point, given that we basically literally have AGI, pursuing other avenues seems like an interesting approach.
- JimSanchez 7mo agoInteresting perspective from LeCun. The debate between scaling LLMs versus building systems that understand the physical world seems like one of the big open questions in AI right now. It will be fascinating to see whether “world models” end up complementing LLMs or eventually replacing parts of them.
- A7OM 7mo ago[flagged]
- anykrver 7mo agoLeCun has been arguing for years that predicting text isn’t enough for real intelligence. This startup is basically his attempt to prove that world models — not bigger LLMs — are the path to AI that can reason about the physical world.
- syngrog66 7mo agopre-money valuation at launch of $2.3B?! they have no product or customers or profit, correct?
- mbrochh 7mo agoI think we will all now witness that LeCun is just an impostor with an unbelievably overblown ego. I predict that he will burn through the investment in not time (most of it will probably trickle into regulator pockets) and he will not have anything to show for in the end.