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Posted by helloplanets 1 day ago

Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world(www.wired.com)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310153721/https://www.wired...

https://www.ft.com/content/e5245ec3-1a58-4eff-ab58-480b6259a... (https://archive.md/5eZWq)

487 points | 396 commentspage 2
fs111 1 day ago|
https://archive.is/20260310070651/https://www.ft.com/content...
verdverm 21 hours ago|
Link does not work, goes into loop at verify human check with some weird redirect

Looks like you appended the original URL to the end

Sebguer 18 hours ago|||
Probably related to the reasoning behind: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

Or you're using Cloudflare DNS.

verdverm 18 hours ago||
I 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?

droidjj 20 hours ago|||
Huh, it's working for me (on Firefox).
paxys 23 hours ago||
I 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 22 hours ago||
I 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 19 hours ago||
I 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.

sothatsit 18 hours ago||
RL on LLMs has changed things. LLMs are not stuck in continuation predicting territory any more.

Models build up this big knowledge base by predicting continuations. But then their RL stage gives rewards for completing problems successfully. This requires learning and generalisation to do well, and indeed RL marked a turning point in LLM performance.

A year after RL was made to work, LLMs can now operate in agent harnesses over 100s of tool calls to complete non-trivial tasks. They can recover from their own mistakes. They can write 1000s of lines of code that works. I think it’s no longer fair to categorise LLMs as just continuation-predictors.

libraryofbabel 16 hours ago|||
Thanks for saying this. It never ceases to amaze me how many people still talk about LLMs like it’s 2023, completely ignoring the RLVR revolution that gave us models like Opus that can one-shot huge chunks of works-first-time code for novel use cases. Modern LLMs aren’t just trained to guess the next token, they are trained to solve tasks.
HarHarVeryFunny 15 hours ago||
Forget 2023 - the advances in coding ability in just last 2-months are amazing. But, they are still not AGI, and it is almost certainly going to take more than just a new training regime such as RL to get there. Demis Hassabis estimates we need another 2-3 "transformer-level" discoveries to get there.
HarHarVeryFunny 15 hours ago|||
RL adds a lot of capability in the areas where it can be applied, but I don't think it really changes the fundamental nature of LLMs - they are still predicting training set continuations, but now trying to predict/select continuations that amount to reasoning steps steering the output in a direction that had been rewarded during training.

At the end of the day it's still copying, not learning.

RL seems to mostly only generalize in-domain. The RL-trained model may be able to generate a working C compiler, but the "logical reasoning" it had baked into it to achieve this still doesn't stop it from telling you to walk to the car wash, leaving your car at home.

There may still be more surprises coming from LLMs - ways to wring more capability out of them, as RL did, without fundamentally changing the approach, but I think we'll eventually need to adopt the animal intelligence approach of predicting the world rather than predicting training samples to achieve human-like, human-level intelligence (AGI).

sothatsit 10 hours ago||
You can’t really say it is just predicting continuations when it is learning to write proofs for Erdos problems, formalise significant math results, or perform automated AI research. Those are far beyond what you get by just being a copying and re-forming machine, a lot of these problems require sophisticated application of logic.

I don’t know if this can reach AGI, or if that term makes any sense to begin with. But to say these models have not learnt from their RL seems a bit ludicrous. What do you think training to predict when to use different continuations is other than learning?

I would say LLM’s failure cases like failing at riddles are more akin to our own optical illusions and blind spots rather than indicative of the nature of LLMs as a whole.

cindyllm 10 hours ago||
[dead]
hdivider 10 hours ago||
It'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 9 hours ago||
By 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 9 hours ago|||
I 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 6 hours ago||
Who 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 6 hours ago||
We 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...

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.

booleandilemma 1 hour ago||
IQ tests are nonsense. The more IQ tests you take the better at them you get. And who is "we", you pretentious dirtbag.
noiv 3 hours ago||
Wouldn't that involve to read and understand an enormous amount of sensor data?
taytus 1 hour ago||
He 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)?
mkl 1 day ago||
Seems like it's the second largest seed round anywhere after Thinking Machines Labs? 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_ 1 day ago|
Thinking 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 23 hours ago||
Was just a grift
hnarayanan 23 hours ago||
Shock, gasp.
Toto336699 3 hours ago||
Following in the foot steps of miss Fei Fei Li's World Lab?

They are currently estimated to be at a 5bn valuation.

imjonse 22 hours ago||
At least some of that money should definitely go towards improving his powerpoint slides on JEPA related work :)
halayli 10 hours ago||
I 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 9 hours ago|
Can 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 being pretty active about banning accounts that break it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

tellarin 8 hours ago|
Selfless 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)

Feedback, suggestions, and collaborators are very welcome!

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