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Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta\u2019s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models.<\/p>\n
LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. \u201cThe idea that you\u2019re going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they\u2019re going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense,\u201d he said in an interview with WIRED.<\/p>\n
The financing, which values the startup at $3.5 billion, was co-led by investors such as Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable backers include Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French billionaire and telecommunications executive Xavier Niel.<\/p>\n
AMI (pronounced like the French word for friend) aims to build \u201ca new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe,\u201d the company says in a press release. The startup says it will be global from day one, with offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore, and New York, where LeCun will continue working as a New York University professor in addition to leading the startup. AMI will be the first commercial endeavor for LeCun since his departure from Meta in November 2025.<\/p>\n
LeCun\u2019s startup represents a bet against many of the world\u2019s biggest AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and even his former workplace, Meta, which believe that scaling up LLMs will eventually deliver AI systems with human-level intelligence or even superintelligence. LLMs have powered viral products such as ChatGPT and Claude Code, but LeCun has been one of the AI industry\u2019s most prominent researchers speaking out about the limitations of these AI models. LeCun is well known for being outspoken, but as a pioneer of modern AI that won a Turing award back in 2018, his skepticism carries weight.<\/p>\n
LeCun says AMI aims to work with companies in manufacturing, biomedical, robotics, and other industries that have lots of data. For example, he says AMI could build a realistic world model of an aircraft engine and work with the manufacturer to help them optimize for efficiency, minimize emissions, or ensure reliability.<\/p>\n
AMI was cofounded by LeCun and several leaders he worked with at Meta, including the company\u2019s former director of research science, Michael Rabbat; former vice president of Europe, Laurent Solly; and former senior director of AI research, Pascale Fung. Other cofounders include Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of the AI health care startup Nabla, who will serve as AMI\u2019s CEO, and Saining Xie, a former Google DeepMind researcher who will be the startup\u2019s chief science officer.<\/p>\n
LeCun does not dismiss the overall utility of LLMs. Rather, in his view, these AI models are simply the tech industry\u2019s latest promising trend, and their success has created a \u201ckind of delusion\u201d among the people who build them. \u201cIt's true that [LLMs] are becoming really good at generating code, and it's true that they are probably going to become even more useful in a wide area of applications where code generation can help,\u201d says LeCun. \u201cThat\u2019s a lot of applications, but it\u2019s not going to lead to human-level intelligence at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
LeCun has been working on world models for years inside of Meta, where he founded the company\u2019s Fundamental AI Research lab, FAIR. But he\u2019s now convinced his research is best done outside the social media giant. He says it\u2019s become clear to him that the strongest applications of world models will be selling them to other enterprises, which doesn\u2019t fit neatly into Meta\u2019s core consumer business.<\/p>\n
As AI world models like Meta\u2019s Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) became more sophisticated, \u201cthere was a reorientation of Meta\u2019s strategy where it had to basically catch up with the industry on LLMs and kind of do the same thing that other LLM companies are doing, which is not my interest,\u201d says LeCun. \u201cSo sometime in November, I went to see Mark Zuckerberg and told him. He\u2019s always been very supportive of [world model research], but I told him I can do this faster, cheaper, and better outside of Meta. I can share the cost of development with other companies \u2026 His answer was, OK, we can work together.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Meta is not an investor in AMI, LeCun says he\u2019s talking with the company about collaborating. For example, he says there\u2019s potential for AMI\u2019s world models to power assistants in the company\u2019s smart glasses.<\/p>\n
LeCun says AMI plans to build open source technology, arguing that artificial intelligence is too powerful to be controlled by any one private company. Such concerns have come up a lot recently since the Pentagon moved to blacklist Anthropic after the startup tried to set red lines around what the US military does with its AI. LeCun, who has often criticized the Trump administration in the past, seems to have found a rare point of agreement with the US government on this issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think any of us, whether it\u2019s me or Dario [Amodei], Sam Altman, or Elon Musk, has any legitimacy to decide for society what is a good or bad use of AI,\u201d says LeCun. \u201cTechnology can be used for good things or bad things. If your government tends to be a little too authoritarian, it could be used for bad things.\u201d<\/p>\n
LeCun has grappled with issues related to AI safety and security before. He notes that a number of countries spy on their own populations through face recognition systems that use a technology he helped pioneer called convolutional nets, a type of neural network inspired by how human brains process visual inputs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was at the origin of those things, but it is not for me to decide what society should do with technology. At least in liberal democracies, the democratic process should decide that, but I can\u2019t have any decision power there,\u201d LeCun says.<\/p>\n
As LeCun notes, some leaders in the AI industry tried to ban the use of AI in autonomous weapons roughly a decade ago. But since then, however, the technology has been used to protect liberal democracies in Europe, he says. Ukraine, for example, has ramped up its use of autonomous drones to fend off attacks from Russia.<\/p>\n
LeCun says AMI will release its first AI models quickly, but he\u2019s not expecting most people to take notice. The company will first work with partners such as Toyota and Samsung, and then will learn how to apply its technology more broadly. Eventually, he says, AMI intends to develop a \u201cuniversal world model,\u201d which would be the basis for a generally intelligent system that could help companies regardless of what industry they work in. \u201cIt\u2019s very ambitious,\u201d he says with a smile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta\u2019s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models. LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47261,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47260","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}