Okay so I need to talk about whatās happening with Yann LeCun because this is genuinely one of the wildest exits Iāve ever seen in tech.
For those who donāt knowāLeCun is one of the āgodfathers of AI.ā Not a marketing title. The man literally won the Turing Award (basically the Nobel Prize of computer science) for helping invent deep learning. Heās been at Meta for over a decade as their Chief AI Scientist. An absolute legend.
So hereās what happened.
Zuckerberg got frustrated. Llama wasnāt moving fast enough. The AI race was heating up and Meta felt like it was falling behind. So what does Zuck do? He drops $14 BILLION on Scale AI and hires its 28-year-old co-founder, Alexandr Wang, to run a brand new āSuperintelligence Lab.ā
And thenāand this is the part that still blows my mindāhe makes Wang⦠LeCunās boss.
Think about that for a second. A 65-year-old Turing Award winner. Four decades of groundbreaking research. The guy who helped BUILD this entire field. Now reporting to someone whose company⦠labels data. (Scale AI is impressive, donāt get me wrong, but they donāt actually build AI models. They annotate training data for other companies.)
LeCun just did an interview with the Financial Times and honestly? He chose violence.
Called Wang āyoungā and āinexperienced.ā Said he has āno experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.ā
And then dropped this absolute gem: āYou donāt tell a researcher what to do. You certainly donāt tell a researcher like me what to do.ā
I mean. The man said what he said.
But waitāit gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it.
LeCun straight up confirmed that Metaās team āfudgedā the Llama 4 benchmark results. Like, actually manipulated them. Used different models on different tests to make the numbers look better. Remember when everyone was suspicious about those benchmarks back in April? Yeah. Turns out they were right to be.
Apparently Zuckerberg was furious when this came out internally. LeCun says he ālost confidence in everyone who was involvedā and basically sidelined the entire GenAI team.
And hereās the thing that really gets meāLeCun has been saying for YEARS that LLMs are a ādead end.ā That you canāt get to real intelligence just by predicting the next word. That we need āworld modelsā that actually understand physical reality, not just language patterns.
Everyone at Meta wanted him to stop saying this publicly. Bad for the narrative, you know? But LeCun refused.
His exact words: āIām not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks Iām wrong. Iām not wrong.ā
Thatās not arrogance. Thatās a scientist whoās seen enough hype cycles to know when something doesnāt add up.
So now heās out. Launching his own company called AMI LabsāAdvanced Machine Intelligence. Theyāre targeting a $3 billion valuation. Building those world models heās been talking about. Says heāll have a ābaby versionā ready within a year.
Oh, and apparently French President Macron personally texted him after the news dropped. LeCun wonāt say what the message said but like⦠the man is getting DMs from heads of state now.
I donāt know if LeCun is right about everything. Maybe LLMs will surprise us. Maybe Meta will figure it out. But when one of the three people who literally invented modern AI walks out the door saying your entire strategy is fundamentally flawed?
I donāt know man. Iād at least ask some questions.
The AI wars just got very, very interesting
It says something when 467 citizens from 46 countries can be illegally taken into custody from International Waters and the worldwide media say nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
Radio silence.
And we all know why.
Vladimir Putin couldn't deliver a speech at the UN General Assembly due to ICC arrest warrant, but Benjamin Netanyahu can deliver his speech at the UN even with ICC arrest warrant?! How much Israeli lobby have control over the UN and the US!
In Gaza, the Israeli army gives residents just ten minutes before bombing their buildings, forcing families to rush out with whatever they can carry, or risk being buried under the rubble, with no regard for their age, health, or state of mind.
for those who haven't been following, this nepal story is fucking crazy:
- bunch of teens and early 20s kids plan start a social movement against the current regime on social issues and econmical inequalties
- government gets wind of it scaling and tries to geoblock social media
- people get more pissed off, start protesting
- government cant handle the protests, lift social media ban
- doesn't do anything, people just organize further
- burn down parliment building, pm's house. beats the shit out of the finance minister in the streets, kills the pm's wife.
- kids elect their own new PM on their discord server, ex-chief justice of the supreme court who was part of the 1990 revolution that ended the monarchy
- army head ackowldges the validity of the discord vote and is meeting the new interm PM to discuss elections for new leadership going foward
i cant believe that i have to write this but the turnover on CT is so insane that people dont even know the lore behind https://t.co/dlH0OTDluu and why this launchpad and the $LLM token should be significant
10 months ago the ai16z DAO was created on this platform. it featured the blonde ai companion Eliza as their mascot (waifu for lack of a better word)
the project was picked up on by mark andressen in the wake of the initial GOAT frenzy and he interacted back and forth, giving lots of publicity to the account
the token eventually ran to $2.5B
Shaw (the developer of eliza) was erratic and egotistical and self sabotaged the project many times over, causing many early supports - myself included, to jeet bags for multiples that pitied in the end to what we could have made
this token is what eliza should have been. @baoskee at https://t.co/dlH0OTDluu is imo the only reason ai16z was allowed to exist and spark such a movement in the first place
now that he is behind the scenes, no shaw involved, i am extremely bullish on what he is going to build
with grok x ani prevalence as well as how much gooning there is on a day to day basis the mascot alone commands a lot of memetic power and when coupled with a potential real product $15m is way too low
Huge update and honestly a step in the right direction.
The impact the fees have had for certain projects has been huge and incentivizes people to work that much harder and most importantly STICK AROUND.
we are able to pay artist, pay marketing, donate to causes, and so much more.
Huge win for those who truly care about making their project be great and last.
W @pumpdotfun
I will add one thing, i think we need to find a solution for non pumpswap og pumpfun coins that dont get fees.
Should find a way to show love to those communities who are still working hard.