Yann LeCun, the former chief artificial intelligence scientist at Meta, has launched a new AI research company and raised more than $1 billion in seed funding to pursue next‑generation artificial intelligence technology.
The startup, called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), is focused on developing “world models”-AI systems designed to understand and interact with the real world more deeply than current large language models. The funding round, reportedly around $1.03 billion, is one of the largest early‑stage investments in a European tech company in recent years.
AMI is backed by a global group of investors from Europe, the United States, and Asia, reflecting strong investor interest in alternative approaches to mainstream generative AI.
LeCun, a Turing Award‑winning AI researcher who spent more than a decade leading Meta’s AI research efforts, is serving as executive chair of the new company. Day‑to‑day operations are managed by a separate CEO.
The company has positioned itself as pursuing AI capable of reasoning about physics, understanding environments, and planning complex sequences of actions, capabilities its founders argue are essential for building more general forms of intelligence.
LeCun’s departure from Meta and the launch of AMI mark a significant shift in his professional career and signal continued evolution in the competitive landscape of artificial intelligence research.
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