[ok2938]

I am no one. I have greatest respect for all Turing award winners.

But one thing I am wary is that LeCun - while special and excellent - is just as many others, working at a place where "AI" is already used to "engage people up" - it is just the nature of the business if you are in the engagement business. And your "AI" will gladly help you in all kind of subtle ways. What is also nice is that it's uncharted territory now, so you can freely roam - and engage the heck out of your audience.

And LeCun is just - as a "neutral" scientist - just doing his part.

Why can't he not work at FB? Money? Data?

[throwawaygh]

> Why can't he not work at FB? Money?

IDK, I get it. Grad school sucks. Post-docs suck. Pre-tenure sucks. Post-tenure isn't any better. For that entire period of time you are working on de facto fixed term contracts. Which is extremely uncommon among salaried engineers, and those that take these sorts of contingent employment contracts are typically paid quite well. It's like 10-15 years of low pay, "will I have a job next year?" stress, and moving your family around all the time (or, more commonly, just not starting a family).

And not even for good pay. These days, even after a decade or more of experience, you're making less than your undergrads. Half as much or even less in some cases.

So, your undergrad once-peers start retiring -- or at least thinking about it -- around the time that you're finally transitioning from de facto fixed-term positions to something resembling a normal employment contract, but, again, for a third to a fifth of what you'd be making in industry at that point in your career.

So, yeah, people say fuck it and cash in on influence/engagement/reputation where they can. The only real alternative is the public sector paying researchers better, but that's never going to happen.

[jstx1]

Those problems might be real but they aren’t really relevant to LeCun - it’s not like his only options are academia and Facebook.

[sidr]

> It's like 10-15 years of low pay, "will I have a job next year?" stress, and moving your family around all the time (or, more commonly, just not starting a family).

While true for many/most PhDs going the academic route, I somehow don't think this held true for Yann LeCun. None of this answers the question of "Why FB?" - he could easily make a slightly smaller boatload of money if he chose to go somewhere else.

[andreyk]

IMO it's similar to why Hinton works for Google - this gives him huge resources (data, compute, money to pay researchers) to do research with, unlike anything to be found in academia. Perhaps this is a naive view, but this is a guy who spent decades pushing for a direction in AI that was not popular but which he really believed in, so it seems natural he would want to accept resources to further research in that direction. Of course, he's also been public about thinking Facebook does more good than bad for the world, in his view.

Also, TBH I doubt he has much to do with the AI used for engagement optimization, his specialty is in other topics and he seems to be focused on the work of Facebook AI Research (which openly engages with academia and so on). And to be fair he is also still a professor at NYU and has students there.

[rchaud]

Because Facebook makes the most money, and probably offered him the most.

Same reason why back in the day, a lot of people got electrical engineering degrees but went into software development or finance. The skills were transferable, and the pay was a lot higher.