Meta-AI veteran Yann LeCun raised $1 billion for AMI, betting on a world model that would rival today’s text-based AI systems.
Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun has raised more than $1 billion in seed funding for his new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI). His investors include leading European companies (Hiro Capital, Cathay Innovation, Groupe Industrial Marcel Dassault), US giants (NVIDIA, Bezos Expeditions, Eric Schmidt), and major Asian companies (Toyota, Samsung).
The 65-year-old French researcher won the 2018 Turing Award (also known as the Nobel Prize in computer science) along with two other professors and led Meta’s AI research for 12 years. But when CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided that Scale AI founder Alexander Wang, 28, would oversee the company’s AI strategy, LeCun knew it was time to take the next step.
His new business, headquartered in Paris, has global ambitions. Chatbots developed by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are, in LeCun’s eyes, limited to text and have no grasp of the real world.
AMI has chosen to focus on building “world models” that can better understand how the world works, accomplish complex tasks, and predict outcomes. LeCun said he hopes to create apps for airplane engines, cars and robots within three to five years.
LeCun, a computer science professor at New York University, has experienced ups and downs during his long career, half of which was spent at ATT’s Bell Labs and Meta in the US. In 1985, while a student at the Sorbonne, he published an early version of the learning algorithm now known as backpropagation in French. It failed. A year later, American scientists drew attention to the same topic.
LeCun persevered and developed a new machine learning method at Bell Labs that enabled handwritten recognition of bank checks, which was implemented by NCR. He is also the developer of Djvu, an image compression technology. And he won the Turing Award with two Canadian colleagues for his research in deep learning.
