$META is hitting 700, and RSU refresher price for 2022 performance was ~110.

My bet, is Yann got a huge set of packages with the AI talent race, and what may have been a $10M/4yr package may now suddenly be 70M+.

Unlikely any other AI lab would be liquid like that.

Presumes he's a weird creature that is motivated by the number. Don't really need to care anymore if you've already got $10 million.

"I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point."

The most obvious options are

1) An insane amount of compensation.

2) Access to an insane amount of compute to train new LLMs.

This type of idol worshipping has to stop. LeCun invented CNN but he also said world simulation using diffusion was a deadened, which has been proven very wrong. The money is better spent hiring new grads with open minds and something to prove.

He's a director not a "in the trenches" researcher anymore. He's being paid for being a highly technical leader who enables and recruits researchers he employs to do great work, similar to Oppenheimer in a way.

> I'm sure France would be willing to set him up

Are you familiar with realities of incorporating a startup in the EU?

In the UK it costs £12 and takes 5 minutes. It costs between £300-600 per year for an accountant to file your accounts, and £12 for your confirmation statement.

And did when we were part of the EU.

Cheaper and quicker than America.

You don't incorporate in the EU, you incorporate in one of the 27 different countries.

All have wildly different requirements.

UK was vastly different from the mainland EU. You're right that the EU is not singular, but once we start talking of Germany, the Netherlands, France, etc. - we quickly hit regulations that bear no resemblance to a free market and some of which are incompatible with IT business whatsoever.

(These costs rocketed last year. Incorporation is now £50, and an electronic confirmation statement is £34.)

You also have all sorts of ancillary fees like the Information Commissioner’s annual charge.

I suspect France/EU would be willing to set him up in a government funded research lab - possibly they already have something going that they could put him in charge of. No issues with incorporation.

Sure, with roughly 50% taxes and a really dynamic free labour market.

Don't judge me, I'm living in the EU and I love the place, but regulations and business climate are definitely not great.

Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter.

Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join.

There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them.

EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models.

I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.

yes ... let's dream on ... until the new openAI becomes just like the old openAI again.

human nature will never change.

q: what is the definition of an optimist?

a: a person with no experience.

q; what is the definition of a pessimist?

a: an optimist with experience.

mine ;)

>I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point.

Maybe he's happy with his compensation, his coworkers, the food at the cafeteria and doesn't want to uproot his life or be burdened with running a company.

>I can imagine he's not happy with Zuck's capitulation

Who did Zuck capitulate to?

I’d be pretty embarrassed to be working for someone who kissed the ring like Zuck did on Jan 20.

So kissing the ring and bending over was okay on Jan 20, 2021?

And it was already embarrassing for a myriad of reasons before that including how he went on Joe Rogan talking about how corporations need more "masculine energy". In the hobbies I participate in (notably I'm not in a major tech hub) some of these tech companies are getting a similar social stigma to like finance (and this is especially pronounced among women I know who really don't like what they view as "tech bros")

Indeed, I think the inauguration was kind of Zuck's "pedo guy" moment, where the pieces fell into place and a whole bunch of people at once were like... oh, yes, okay I see what is actually the state of things here.

Zucc has been kissing various unsavory rings for a long time, though. It's not like this just started. Didn't he ask China's President for the honor of naming his baby? [1] Totally shameless suck-up.

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/china-s-president-...

I've always thought that Zuck looked like a psychopath, even leaving aside his actions, many of which I have read about in the past.

you just have to take a look at his face, and those mad staring eyes.

>some of these tech companies are getting a similar social stigma to like finance

SV """tech""" companies have had this stigma since at least mid-2010s. Don't you remember the awfulness of Uber's CEO?

A lot of bros in tech delude themselves that they are the "in touch" ones and actually no, it's not chauvinism and misogyny it's just some "masculine energy" but it's always been lies.

It really shouldn't be this surprising that the same people who swear that there's nothing wrong with tech that results in it's INSANE gender ratios despite historical evidence that women love to code continue to ignore obvious signs of their bad behavior.

IDK, maybe it's proximity to hollywood and it's wealth of rich chauvinists and sex predators. Maybe california has something in the water that makes rich men act like sex predators. Or maybe they are a representative sample of male behavior when in positions of power over women in the USA and they just get outed more.

very, except that embarrassed is too weak a word.

> Who did Zuck capitulate to?

There's a pretty decent list of the actions and changes at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/technology/meta-mark-zuck....

I've seen him on record that he'd pretty much work for whoever pays him (in the context of research grants for military). Virtue signaling to feel good is only worth so much to people. Humans compartmentalize very well.

It saddens me that taking an ethical stance is now derisively considered "virtue signaling".

I would never work at Meta, not because refusing to do so would make me feel good, but because working there would make me feel like I'm making the world a worse place.

The idea of having a moral compass is antagonistic to the worldview of a lot of people in tech, so they are instinctively dismissive or condescending to anyone who does.

This seems like a pretty widely shared ethos in today's software engineering culture. "I'd happily build the Torment Nexus if you pay me enough!" No ethical baseline below which we refuse to pass. Simply a required $$$:EVIL ratio.

It's not always like that. Most of the team would be hired to move protobufs around for the Torment Nexus so it seems quite innocuous.

Yea, I think this is how a lot of engineers rationalize it. "Well, I'm not directly participating in my company's A/B experiment to see what types of content drive children to suicidal ideation! I'm just moving data from the project's logging side of the stack to the metrics side of the stack so that reports can be generated. Don't blame me!"