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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on what AI pioneer Yann LeCuns new company will likely build after he departs from Meta. I also look at Marc Andreessens jab at the Pope on X, and at Fei-Fei Lis view of the AI world since 2012. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. Yann LeCuns departure from Meta, and what hell likely do next Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer who has led Metas Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division since 2013, will reportedly leave that post to start his own AI research lab. LeCun plans to depart in the coming months, and has begun early fundraising discussions to support his new venture, the reports say. The new startup will focus on building world models, or AI systems that learn from images, video, and spatial data instead of relying solely on text and large language models. After developing open-source Llama models that fell behind other LLMs, Meta has gone on a very lavish recruiting spree to hire world-class researchers for a new effort to build state-of-the-art models. Metas newest models, sources say, are likely to be closed-source, and are expected to follow the same general architecture and training methods used by rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. In other words, they will continue relying on the same transformer architecture invented at Google in 2017 (which kicked off the generative AI boom) while continually using more training data and computing power to achieve intelligence gains. LeCun has been critical of that approach, and doubts that it has produced AI that truly reasons, rather than just detects patterns and predicts the next word or pixel in a sequence. LeCun has called for more foundational research on alternate paths that could more quickly lead to AI models that can match or exceed human intelligence. His recent research has focused on world modelingdeveloping AI systems capable of quickly learning about the physical world as human babies do. So expect LeCuns new company to build new kinds of models, or systems of models, that learn and represent aspects of the real world, including physics, in new ways. Its likely that these models will be trained through watching thousands of hours of video, instead of relying on text or still images. They will also likely be able to capture more nuances of the real world, such as state changes and transitions (how environments shift and evolve), than current models. Success might mean the creation of AI systems or robots with a far more advanced understanding of the world and how to take action in it, and that are far better at continually learning from and remodeling the world as we humans do. Marc Andreessen goes for a cheap shot on the Pope, faces backlash Marc Andreessen, of the storied VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, is an AI accelerationist who might Twitter-block anyone even suggesting the industry should devote more time to safety and alignment. Now hes facing backlash for taking a shot at the Pope on X last weekend when the Holy See called for morality in technology. The Pope tweeted that the builders of our AI future should develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. (See the whole tweet here.) That was enough to trigger Andreessen, a committed MAGA cheerleader and close adviser to President Trump on tech issues. Andreessen didnt offer an argument, but posted a meme meant to convey a derisive and dismissive response to the Popes message. The meme was a still photo of GQs Katherine Stoeffel pointing a What the fuck are you talking about? expression at actress Sydney Sweeney during a recent interview. Andreessen deleted the tweet, but not before many on the tech side of Twitter saw it. Some objected to a billionaire VC responding so blithely to the literal Pope. Others noted the irony of Twitter doing unto Andreessen as Andreessen has done unto others. Pretty funny/surreal to see @pmarca dodge the woke cancellation mobs for the last decade, only to have his closest brush with cancel-death come at the hands of the very religious denomination who invented cancel culture in the 15th century, VC Lee Edwards noted. Still others took issue with the idea Andreessen seemed to convey, which is that VCs should invest in technologies that demonstrate value and make money, without regard for whether or not the technology will make the world a better or worse place or, perhaps, a safer or more dangerous one. One of those was the widely followed tech commentator @growing_daniel on X. If youre going to dedicate your life to building something…what Im saying is that you should reflect morally, Daniel said on the TBPN videocast after Andreessens Pope tweet. The Popes entire point was that you should think about that and try to do good things. Daniel acknowledged that Andreessen and a16z have invested a lot of money in software as a service companies that have made businesses run better. But he also cites a16zs $15 million investment in Cluely, a startup that originally billed its app as a tool to cheat on everything (meaning job interviews, exams, or sales calls). How Fei-Fei Li describes the history of AI since ImageNet Fei-Fei Li played a huge role in kicking off the current AI revolution when, back in 2012, she invented the ImageNet image training data set that taught AI models how to classify images. On November 12, her new company, World Labs, released its first model, Marble, a world model that has an understanding of the makeup of 3D environments (as humans do) and can imagine and generate them based on text, images, or video uploaded by the user. These environments could be used in anything from game development to VFX design to digital twins, she believes. From ImageNet to world models, Li has come a long way. When I spoke to her I asked her to describe her view of the AI revolution as its happened so far. Heres what she said. I think the world model is a fairly natural but significant continuation of the generative AI era. The generative AI era is the latest of the . . . deep learning revolution. In 2012 we started the deep learning revolution by squarely establishing the three forces of AI: the neural network, data, and computing chips or GPUs. Every progress weve made in AI so far continues to bank on the power of these three fundamental elements of modern AI. And one of the most important milestones was the transformer model. The sequence-to-sequence modeling for language really unlocked a fairly powerful scaling law that gave rise to large models that can be trained by a large amount of data [to] become very powerful and generalizable. First out of the gate were large language models. And the derivative of large language models are these multimodel large language models (which understand not just words, but audio, video, images, and code). They are still built on the backbone of large language models. But I think the large world model is really a significant step towards unlocking AIs capability. Interestingly, Li suggests that as the AI industry pushes toward models that are generally as intelligent as humans, then generally far more intelligent, researchers may need to rely on more than just the transformer model architecture that ignited the industry in 2017 and led to things like ChatGPT. (The GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.) She explains: I would say this goes beyond the transformer. Its still early. So the model architecture is still subject to research. But you know the recent progress in transformer models [and] diffusion models and beyond are part of the exploration but I wouldnt call it solidly owing to transformers. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Anthropic and Microsoft announce new AI data center projects in Texas, New York, and Georgia Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey are getting AI voice clones with ElevenLabs Fei-Fei Lis World Labs unveils its world-generating AI model Agentic AI isnt always the answer Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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Last June, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky took on a second job. Microsoft, the social network for business professionals owner since 2016, expanded his responsibilities to include Microsoft 365the suite still better known by its former name, Microsoft Officeand its Copilot AI assistant. The role charges him with making AI useful in a productivity context, a goal thats still very much a work in progress.But Roslansky also remains in charge of LinkedIn, a place whose entire reason for being springs from the network effect of its billion-plus members. Their unique connections, learnings, and willingness to help other people cant be fed into an LLM and reprocessed into the kind of generic advice a chatbot can spout. In a world of increasingly commodified information, Roslansky argues that LinkedIns essential humanity is more essential than ever.Trusted, contextual, expert-driven knowledgethe type of stuff that comes from having a lived experience or doing a specific job or having a deep insight or knowing people that have actually done the jobin my view, thats becoming much more valuable, not less, he says. I think the question moving forward from professionals isn’t just going to be something like, What’s the answer?, but Who can I trust to guide me? And that’s where we come in.Still, once you venture beyond your core LinkedIn contacts, its never been all that easy to tap into the power of your network. We’ve always had, what I’ll call decent, keyword-based lexical people search that allows you to type someone’s name if you know them, says Roslansky. We did a decent job at name-plus-company. But even if you were seeking a particular kind of advice or favor that a friend of a friend (or a friend of a friend of a friend) might have been happy to dispense, there was no guarantee youd be able to track them down with keywords and filters.Now LinkedIn is taking a major step to address that. A new feature called AI-powered people search uses generative AI to break past the limitations of conventional search. It understands requests such as investors with FDA experience for a biotech startup, Northwestern alumni who work in entertainment marketing, teachers turned industrial designers, and who can help me raise money for a nonprofit? The results it returns include relevant profiles regardless of the exact words you used to phrase the search.[Animation: Courtesy of LinkedIn]AI-powered people search is rolling out first to members who pay for LinkedIn Premium accounts, but the company says it will eventually be available to all users. It follows the AI-powered job search feature introduced earlier this year, which Rolansky notes can understand open-ended asks such as I want to help bring humanity to Mars or I want to work on AI products with my finance skills.Using technology thats very 2025, these features deliver on the promise of the nearly 23-year-old sites original vision thatas an early tagline put itrelationships matter. Members who have managed to rack up hundreds of connections over the years might find new value in visiting the site more regularly and diving deeper.The company was founded on the idea that if we were able to build a valuable community, that any professional can become more productive and successful through other people in their network, says Roslansky. When you can leverage AI to reason over that network of people, it opens up a whole new world.[Animation: Courtesy of LinkedIn]As for how LinkedIns ongoing evolution fits into Roslanskys new role at Microsoft, he points out several advantages to his twin responsibilities.For one, the ability to sit in on meetings with people like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CTO Kevin Scott, and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman give him a view into where the bleeding edge of where AI and technology are going. But expanding his purview is also about aspects of LinkedIns mission that remain unfulfilled even nine years after the two companies became one.Recruiters, we make productive and successful, Roslansky explains. Salespeople. Marketers. But general professionals are still something that we are decent at, not what we’ve thrived on. It turns out the greatest set of tools in the world to make professionals more productive is the suite of office tools that I have the amazing honor to be working on right now.Until now, LinkedIn has felt like a most distant relative of Microsoftian stalwarts such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As AI provides opportunities to rethink all these productswith well over a century of combined history behind them Roslansky says hes thinking about them holistically. That alone is a new approach. And its upshot could shape the future of some of the worlds most-used business tools.
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Online betting is more accessible than ever, with 14% of U.S. adults saying they bet on professional or college sports online either frequently or occasionally, according to a February poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It’s also in the news, with a growing list of sports betting scandals making headlines.Public health advocates and personal finance advisers say it’s important to know the risks if you’re going to gamble online.“Gambling and ‘responsibly’ seem to be oxymoronic, because if you’re gambling it’s all about risk,” said Caleb Silver, editor in chief of personal finance site Investopedia. “But people still do it. Online gambling and sports betting are only becoming more popular.”Since the Supreme Court struck down a ban on sports betting in 2018, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized gambling, according to the American Gaming Association.For those new to online gambling, it can be helpful to set limits in advance on how much you’re willing to lose and how much time you’re willing to spend. Many of the platforms and apps that offer gambling, such as FanDuel and DraftKings, include optional safeguards to limit time or losses. Other apps can block access to the platforms for set amounts of time.Here’s what to know: Online gambling can be riskier than gambling in person The potential losses of digital betting can occur more quickly than in a physical casino, according to Heather Eshleman, director of operations at the Maryland Center for Excellence on Problem Gambling, since people can bet so much so easily and quickly on the internet or apps, with less friction.The new prevalence of prediction markets, such as PredictIt and Kalshi, has also created new opportunities to place wagers online on everything from election outcomes to celebrity news to the weather. How to tell if you have a problem with online gambling According to public health advocates, the biggest warning sign of a problem is if you’re devoting time to online betting that’s taking away from other things in your life especially your relationships with friends, family, and work. If you’re spending money on gambling that could instead go towards unmet basic needs, that’s also a warning sign.“We encourage people to only use money they would use for fun and entertainment, not money that should be used to pay the mortgage or the rent or to pay for food,” said Eshleman.Silver echoed this.“You have to know before you do it how much you can afford to lose,” he said. “What is your ‘tap out point?’ Those rules have to be firmly established.” Ways to limit online gambling Most sports betting platforms offer “responsible gambling tools,” according to Eshleman.“You can set limits on time, money, deposits, wins, and losses,” she said. “The goal is to set those limits before you start, because if you don’t set them in advance, they’re not really going to work for you. Once you’re into the excitement of it, you’re not going to stop and use those tools.”Eshleman recommends apps such as GambBan and BetBlocker, which limit access to gambling sites externally. She also directs those who suspect they may have a problem to use the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline or contact Gamblers Anonymous. Know the risks and downsides Silver, the head of Investopedia, said he started adding definitions of online betting and gambling terms to the personal finance site when he saw an increasingly “closer connection between sports betting, day trading, options trading, and cryptocurrency trading.” He encourages those who are interested in digital betting to make sure they know what they’re getting into.“Before anyone even gets an online (gambling) account, they should be required to know the fundamental terms and rules about the way sports betting works,” he said. “What’s the ‘money line’ or ‘parlay?’ How do odds work? What is the maximum I could lose on this bet?”The other thing to do is to “play with no expectation of a return,” he said. “The likelihood is that you will lose. So, if you’re willing to lose, how much are you willing to lose?”Cory Fox, senior vice president of public policy and sustainability at FanDuel, who handles the site’s responsible gambling initiatives, compares using the safeguards to wearing a seatbelt when driving in a car and said FanDuel is committed to setting standards for being a responsible operator in the online gambling space.Lori Kalani, chief responsible gaming officer at DraftKings, said the site is committed to the same goal and compared using the limit-setting tools to taking Ubers instead of driving on a night when you know you’ll be drinking.Fox added that responsible gambling tools are important to help allow FanDuel to maintain its social license. He said that it’s in the interest of the site to make sure its users can be on the site and play for a long time to come. Make sure it’s not a coping mechanism “If you’re taking care of your mental health, you’re less likely to have a problem with gambling,” Eshleman said.Rather than turning to the thrill of placing online bets, Eshleman encourages people to find positive ways to cope with stress listening to music, taking walks, getting more sleep and exercise, and spending more time socializing. Social gambling is safer than hidden, private gambling, she said.“If you’re doing it alone, that’s a red flag that it’s not an activity that’s healthy for you,” said Eshleman. “It all ties in to our basic wellness. I think if people focus on wellness, it will prevent a lot of gambling.” The Associated Press receives support from the Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism. Cora Lewis, Associated Press
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