One of the iconic figures in AI has secured record funding for Europe through his new startup
Yann LeCun, one of the most important people in the field of artificial intelligence, has secured a billion dollars in funding for his new startup that aims to build so-called “world models” capable of “understanding” the physical world and being integrated into a wide range of applications,
The startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs and was founded in January in Paris, with several researchers who worked on Meta with LeCun among the founders. It is very rare for European AI startups to receive such a substantial round of funding right from the start.
All the more, the amount is impressive, especially since AMI has only 12 employees. The investors are from Europe, Asia and the US, and the companies include an investment fund from Jeff Bezos' portfolio.
After this investment, the company is valued at $3.5 billion, Wired writes.
AMI Labs aims to create a new generation of AI systems capable of understanding the physical world and being used in large-scale applications from robotics to transportation. The company's motto is “real world, real intelligence”
Yann LeCun argues that most human reasoning is anchored in the physical world, not language, and that these “world models” are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. “The idea that you're going to expand the capabilities of LLMs to the point where they're going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense,” he said in an interview with Wired.
AMI Labs aims to build “a new generation of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and secure,” the company says in a press release.
The startup will have offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore and New York
Yann LeCun is one of the founding fathers of modern artificial intelligence and an early visionary in the field of AI
LeCun is one of the most renowned experts in artificial intelligence. He also teaches at New York University and started working for Meta in 2013, where he led the Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Research lab. Later, he was the head of the scientific department.
