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.

LeCun'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

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.

I 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.

While 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).

There 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-...

Partner 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.

I 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.

Is 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.