SAN FRANCISCO: Late last year, Yann LeCun left his job as chief AI scientist at Meta to launch a startup.
Arguing that Meta and other leading artificial intelligence companies would eventually hit a dead end with their single-minded approach to building intelligent machines, he planned to take a different tack with his new company.
Now, his startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, or AMI Labs, has raised more than $1 billion in seed funding from investors in the US, Europe and Asia. Some are familiar names like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Mark Cuban, a minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, while others are less recognizable venture capital firms.
Although AMI Labs is only a month old and employs only 12 people, this funding round values the company at $3.5 billion.
The deal, announced Tuesday, shows that investors are still willing to make enormous bets on experienced AI researchers. Even as many financial analysts and industry insiders warn of an AI bubble, investors have poured enormous amounts of money into several new startups in recent months, including Project Prometheus, which raised $6.2 billion from Bezos and others.
Many of these startups are staffed by researchers who previously worked at Google, OpenAI, Meta and other leading companies. Two examples, Humans& and Ricursive AI, are both valued at more than $4 billion.
LeCun, 65, was one of three pioneering researchers who received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on the technology that is now the foundation for modern AI.
Although his research laid the groundwork for large language models, or LLMs — the technology that drives chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT — DLeCun has long argued that these systems are not a path to truly intelligent machines. The problem with LLMs, he said, is they do not plan ahead. Trained solely on digital data, they do not have a way of understanding the complexities of the real world.
With AMI Labs, LeCun and his colleagues — many of whom worked with him at Meta — want to build a system that can plan ahead in ways that LLMs cannot.
Alex LeBrun, AMI Labs’ CEO and a former Meta engineer, said the company would operate a lot like a research lab, exploring new and untested ideas, but that it would eventually move into products. Its technologies could help power everything from health care applications to robots.
“If you try to take robots into open environments — into households or into the street — they will not be useful with current technology,” LeBrun told the Times. “We want to help them reach to new situations with more common sense.”