7 ms·
Regardless 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
by ZeroCool2u 7mo ago
Regardless 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.
- Signez 7mo agoYann Le Cun litteraly said this morning on the radio in France that it is headquarted in Paris and will pay taxes in France. Go figure…
- kvgr 7mo agoThere will be no corporate taxes for a long time, so alls good.
- mi_lk 7mo agoDoesn’t he live in New York himself? Although not sure if that matters depending on his role
- roromainmain 7mo agoFor such companies, France also offers generous R&D tax credits (Crédit Impôt Recherche): companies can recover roughly 30% of eligible R&D expenses incurred in France as a tax credit, which can eventually be refunded (in cash) if the company has no taxable profit.
- storus 7mo agoIs that alongside 100% of R&D expenses amortized in taxes when a company has taxable profit covering them?
- roromainmain 7mo agoYes indeed, if the company is profitable.
- ttoinou 7mo agoNo he said something like “well yes, only for the parts of profits made in France”
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- stingraycharles 7mo agoThat's a Singaporian newspaper, though; not sure if it's objectively their main base, or just one of them
- fnands 7mo agoProbably just a satellite office. Might be to be close to some of Yann's collaborators like Xavier Bresson at NUS
- throwpoaster 7mo ago"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." Almost certainly the IP will be held in Singapore for tax reasons.
- RamblingCTO 7mo agoWhich would be a good idea, as a European. I'd hate to see the investment go to waste on taxes that are spent on stupid shit anyway. Should go into R&D not fighting bureaucracy.
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoI didn't really know who he was, so I went and found his wikipedia, which is written like either he wrote it himself to stroke his ego, or someone who likes him wrote it to stroke his ego: > He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before leaving to work on his own startup company. That entire sentence before the remarks about him service at Meta could have been axed, its weird to me when people compare themselves to someone else who is well known. It's the most Kanye West thing you can do. Mind you the more I read about him, the more I discovered he is in fact egotistical. Good luck having a serious engineering team with someone who is egotistical.
- timr 7mo agoIt's not comparing him to anyone. He has an endowed professorship. This is standard in academia, and you give the name because a) it's prestigious for the recipient and b) it strokes the ego of the donor.
- leoc 7mo agoRight: no-one cares about the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemat... because of Henry Lucas, it's the other way around.
- pama 7mo agoYou underestimate academia. Any academic that reads these two sentences only focuses on the first one: He has a named chair at Courant. In Germany, being a a Prof is added to your ID card/passport and becomes part of your official name, like knighthood in other countries.
- dr_hooo 7mo agoNo true regarding the IDs, only PhD titles can be added. Not job descriptions. Source: academia person in Germany.
- brandonb 7mo agoLeCun's technical approach with AMI will likely be based on JEPA, which is also a very different approach than most US-based or Chinese AI labs are taking. If you're looking to learn about JEPA, LeCun's vision document "A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence" is long but sketches out a very comprehensive vision of AI research: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf Training JEPA models within reach, even for startups. For example, we're a 3-person startup who trained a health timeseries JEPA. There are JEPA models for computer vision and (even) for LLMs. You don't need a $1B seed round to do interesting things here. We need more interesting, orthogonal ideas in AI. So I think it's good we're going to have a heavyweight lab in Europe alongside the US and China.
- sanderjd 7mo agoHave you published anything about your health time series model? Sounds interesting!
- brandonb 7mo agoSure! Here’s a description: https://www.empirical.health/blog/wearable-foundation-model-jets/ https://www.empirical.health/blog/wearable-foundation-model-...
- sanderjd 7mo agoThanks! This is very neat. BTW, I went to your website looking for this, but didn't find your blog. I do now see that it's linked in the footer, but I was looking for it in the hamburger menu.
- brandonb 7mo agoThanks! We need to re-do the top navigation / hamburger menu -- we've added a bunch of new things in the past few months, and it badly needs to be re-organized.
- smugma 7mo ago
- jsnell 7mo agoI don't think it's "regardless", your opinion on LeCun being right should be highly correlated to your opinion on whether this is good for Europe. If you think that LLMs are sufficient and RSI is imminent (<1 year), this is horrible for Europe. It is a distracting boondoggle exactly at the wrong time.
- andrepd 7mo agoIt's been 6 months away for 5 years now. In that time we've seen relatively mild incremental changes, not any qualitative ones. It's probably not 6 months away.
- basket_horse 7mo agoBut I swear this time is different! Just give me another 6 months!
- andrepd 7mo agoAnd another 6 trillion dollars :^)
- AStrangeMorrow 7mo agoYeah. I feel like that like many projects the last 20% take 80% of time, and imho we are not in the last 20% Sure LLMs are getting better and better, and at least for me more and more useful, and more and more correct. Arguably better than humans at many tasks yet terribly lacking behind in some others. Coding wise, one of the things it does “best”, it still has many issues: For me still some of the biggest issues are still lack of initiative and lack of reliable memory. When I do use it to write code the first manifests for me by often sticking to a suboptimal yet overly complex approach quite often. And lack of memory in that I have to keep reminding it of edge cases (else it often breaks functionality), or to stop reinventing the wheel instead of using functions/classes already implemented in the project. All that can be mitigated by careful prompting, but no matter the claim about information recall accuracy I still find that even with that information in the prompt it is quite unreliable. And more generally the simple fact that when you talk to one the only way to “store” these memories is externally (ie not by updating the weights), is kinda like dealing with someone that can’t retain memories and has to keep writing things down to even get a small chance to cope. I get that updating the weights is possible in theory but just not practical, still.
- barrell 7mo agoWhile I’d love there to be a European frontier model, I do very much enjoy mistral. For the price and speed it outperforms any other model for my use cases (language learning related formatting, non-code non-research).
- vessenes 7mo agoPartner in a fund that wrote a small check into this — I have no private knowledge of the deal - while I agree that one’s opinion on auto regressive models doesn’t matter, I think the fact of whether or not the auto regressive models work matters a lot, and particularly so in LeCun’s case. What’s different about investing in this than investing in say a young researcher’s startup, or Ilya’s superintelligence? In both those cases, if a model architecture isn’t working out, I believe they will pivot. In YL’s case, I’m not sure that is true. In that light, this bet is a bet on YL’s current view of the world. If his view is accurate, this is very good for Europe. If inaccurate, then this is sort of a nothing-burger; company will likely exit for roughly the investment amount - that money would not have gone to smaller European startups anyway - it’s a wash. FWIW, I don’t think the original complaint about auto-regression “errors exist, errors always multiply under sequential token choice, ergo errors are endemic and this architecture sucks” is intellectually that compelling. Here: “world model errors exist, world model errors will always multiply under sequential token choice, ergo world model errors are endemic and this architecture sucks.” See what I did there? On the other hand, we have a lot of unused training tokens in videos, I’d like very much to talk to a model with excellent ‘world’ knowledge and frontier textual capabilities, and I hope this goes well. Either way, as you say, Europe needs a frontier model company and this could be it.
- neversupervised 7mo agoIs it good? This will almost certainly fail. Not because Yann or Europe, but because these sort of hyper-hyped projects fail. SSI and Thinking Machines haven’t lived to the hype.
- ma2rten 7mo agoErm, ... OpenAI has hyped when it started and it took 6 years to take off. It's way to early to declare the SSI and Thinking Machines have failed.
- koakuma-chan 7mo agoThey took money and haven't released anything. How are they doing?
- levocardia 7mo agoTo be fair to SSI, they were very explicit about their plan: "we are going to take money and not release anything until we one-shot superintelligence." If you invested in that you knew what you were getting yourself into!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- crystal_revenge 7mo ago> fully ceding the research front is not a good way to keep the EU competitive Tech is ultimately a red herring as far as what's needed to keep the EU competitive. The EU has a trillion dollar hole[0] to fill if they want to replace US military presence, and current net import over 50% of their energy. Unfortunately the current situation in Iran is not helping either of these as they constrains energy further and risks requiring military intervention. 0. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europes-1-trillion-race-to-build-back-its-defense-industry-db8ca1d6 https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europes-1-trillion-race-to-...
- gandalfstoe 7mo agoRight, they really need a military industrial complex to be "competitive" :eyeroll. Are you suggesting regressing to the stone age?
- crystal_revenge 7mo agoEurope doesn't want to be reliant (understandably) on the US military for defense, because if they are, as Trump has demonstrated, they will be pressured to make concessions not in their interests. The need for a military is tightly coupled with the EU's need for energy. You can see this in the immediate impact that the war in Iran has had on Germany's natural gas prices [0]. But already unable to defend itself from Russia, EU countries are in a tough spot since they can't really afford to expend military resources defending their energy needs, and yet also don't have the energy independence to ignore these military engagements without risk. Meanwhile Russia has spend the last 4 years transition to a wartime economy and is getting hungry for expanded resource acquisition. The world hasn't fundamentally changed since the stone age: humans need resources to survive and if there aren't enough people for those resources then violence will decide who has access the them. 0. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/germany-natural-gas-the https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/germany-natural-gas-t...
- sofixa 7mo ago> But already unable to defend itself from Russia, EU countries I'm sorry, but this is just crazy talk. Russia cannot enforce its will on Ukraine, one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe, with a (at time of invasion) relatively small and underequipped army. Yes it has grown through conscription, has been equipped by foreign and domestic supplies, has made some brilliant advances in tech and tactics... but when it was attacked, it was weak. And Russia lost its best troops and equipment failing to defat that. Why would anyone think that the Russia that cannot defeat Ukraine would fare better against Poland? Let alone French warning strike nukes, or French, British, German troops and planes and what not.
- chrisgd 7mo ago33% of the business in a seed round is nuts
- ak_111 7mo agocan you elaborate more, also isn't this necessary for a Lab that wants to compete with highly funded entities (like OpenAI, Anthropic)?
- chrisgd 7mo agoAt this rate, with round 4, outside investors own 70% of company. It’s not wrong, but unusual. Most seed round might be 10-20% of business. Your point on quantum of capital could be the disconnect for me.
- nailer 7mo ago> Regardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI My main concern with Lecunn are the amount of times he has repeatedly told people software is open source when it’s license directly violates the open source definition.
- gigatexal 7mo agoAs an American here in Berlin, I, too welcome this. I would love for there to be many large well capitalized companies here for me to work at.