@fj@mastodon.social
Really enjoyed this interview with @yannlecun in the FT.
Meta really had a single success in LLMs and that was Llama 2 which was built by the team that became Mistral. The rest was downwards from there. LeCun warns that the people left are “LLM-pilled” kids trying to reach super intelligence, which is foolish. At least he has the scientific integrity to say it publicly and left to pursue a more promising and laudable endeavor
https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/13ee86f5-2a75-457b-8898-27e4d2e40a1b
For alt text:
LeCun doesn't mince his words about why he ultimately decided to leave Meta after more than a decade. Staying became politically difficult, he tells me. And while Zuckerberg likes LeCun's world model research, the crowd who were hired for the company's new superintelligence push are "completely LLM-pilled".
"You don't tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do"
This clearly alienated LeCun. "I'm sure there's a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence," he says. "But I'm not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I'm wrong. I'm not wrong. My integrity as a scientist cannot allow me to do this."
