Re:Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused o...
by bwfan123 on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @10:55AM
(#45901693)
Nice commentary and I enjoyed the poetic turn of phrase. I had to respond to it with my own thoughts if only to bookmark it for myself.
> how many people are continually ready to mistake language for thought
This is a fundamental illusion - where, rote memory and names and words get mistaken for understanding. This was wonderfully illustrated here [1]. Few really grok what understanding actually is. This is an unfortunate by-product of the education system we have.
> Are they all P-zombies or just obedience-conditioned into emulating ones?!?!?
Brilliant way to state the fundamental human condition. ie, we are all zombies obedience conditioned to imitate rather than understand. Social media amplifies the zombification, and now LLMs too.
> Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable
This is the fundamental tension between operationalized meaning and imagination wherein a grokking soul gathers mists from the cosmic chaos and creates meaning and then continually adapts it.
> it's amazing if sad that they cracked it by more data and not by more model
I was speaking to experts in the sciences (chemistry) and they were shocked that the underlying architecture is brute force, and they expected some theory which turns out to be compact and information compressed not by brute-force but by theorization.
> The physical limits of human language as information processing device have been hit at some point in the XX century
2000 years back when humans realized that formalism was needed to operationalize meaning, and natural language was too vague to capture and communicate it. Only because the world model that natural language captures encompasses "everything" whereas for making it "useful" requires to limit the world model via formalism.
> how many people are continually ready to mistake language for thought
This is a fundamental illusion - where, rote memory and names and words get mistaken for understanding. This was wonderfully illustrated here [1]. Few really grok what understanding actually is. This is an unfortunate by-product of the education system we have.
> Are they all P-zombies or just obedience-conditioned into emulating ones?!?!?
Brilliant way to state the fundamental human condition. ie, we are all zombies obedience conditioned to imitate rather than understand. Social media amplifies the zombification, and now LLMs too.
> Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable
This is the fundamental tension between operationalized meaning and imagination wherein a grokking soul gathers mists from the cosmic chaos and creates meaning and then continually adapts it.
> it's amazing if sad that they cracked it by more data and not by more model
I was speaking to experts in the sciences (chemistry) and they were shocked that the underlying architecture is brute force, and they expected some theory which turns out to be compact and information compressed not by brute-force but by theorization.
> The physical limits of human language as information processing device have been hit at some point in the XX century
2000 years back when humans realized that formalism was needed to operationalize meaning, and natural language was too vague to capture and communicate it. Only because the world model that natural language captures encompasses "everything" whereas for making it "useful" requires to limit the world model via formalism.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483976