San Francisco Frontiers - French AI startup AMI announces $1 bn raised in funding

This first funding round for AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence) was carried out by five investment funds and attracted investment from several big groups, including Toyota, Nvidia and Samsung.

Notable names in tech, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, also bought in.

LeCun told AFP that, with the funding round complete, AMI would bring aboard 20-30 people "in the very short term".

He and five co-founders plan to "shift into a higher gear" on developing "world models", or AI systems designed to understand the physical world.

Unlike the text-based large language models (LLMs) behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, such AIs should understand the world "in the way animals and humans do," he added.

"Yann LeCun is turning a new page in artificial intelligence. This is the France of researchers, builders and the bold. Bravo!" President Emmanuel Macron posted on X.

Based in Paris with offices in New York, Singapore and Montreal, AMI was valued at around $3.5 billion before this funding round.

- 'Paradigm shift' -

LeCun announced his departure from Meta in November, after 12 years with the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

He now serves as AMI's non-executive chairman, while Alexandre Lebrun is the Paris-based startup's CEO.

Within three to five years, AMI plans to produce "fairly universal intelligent systems" that could be used for almost any task requiring intelligent machines, such as autonomous driving and robotics, LeCun said.

"I am very clearly in the camp that believes we need a paradigm shift" from the AI reliance on LLMs, he told AFP.

LeCun has been a vocal critic of major AI developers' laser focus on LLMs, which was one reason for why he left Meta -- although he insists he still has "a good relationship with Mark Zuckerberg".

AMI's work will take up where LeCun left off with research at Meta on a new AI architecture dubbed JEPA.

"It's a direct continuation of that project," he said.

Researchers hope world models will allow AI systems to analyse and predict the behaviour of complex systems, such as a jet engine, a power plant or the organs of a human patient.

LeCun, a dual French-American citizen who remains a computer science professor at New York University, said AMI would focus on research and development in its first year.

Discussions with corporate partners could be held within six to 12 months, he added.

C.Lewis--SFF