Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup co-founded by computer science pioneer and former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, said Tuesday that it has raised $1.03 billion to develop “world models,” or AI designed to learn from and interact with the physical world.
The funding for Paris-based AMI represents the largest seed round ever for a European startup and one of the region’s largest fundings for an AI startup overall, per Crunchbase data. Bezos Expeditions, Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital led the funding, which reportedly values AMI at $3.5 billion.
AMI differs from the popular generative AI startups in that it aims to develop world models, or artificial intelligence that interacts with and learns from three-dimensional reality.
“My prediction is that ‘world models’ will be the next buzzword,” AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun told TechCrunch after the funding. “In six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding.”
His co-founder LeCun is considered one of the pioneers of the large language model approach to AI. In 2018, LeCun was one of the computer scientists who received the industry’s prestigious A.M. Turing Award for his work on neural networks and learning algorithms.
Their new startup, however, is premised on the idea that the two-dimensional approach used by LLMs is, by definition, limiting. To be truly useful, AI must be able to understand and interact with 3D reality, AMI’s leaders argue.
“Generative architecture trained by self-supervised learning mimic intelligence; they don’t genuinely understand the world. Predicting tokens, though powerful, works best for discrete and low-dimensional tasks like information retrieval, summarization, coding, and mathematics,” AMI CEO LeBrun wrote on LinkedIn. “However, factories, hospitals, and robots operating in open environments demand AI that grasps reality. And reality is not tokenized: it’s continuous, noisy and high-dimensional. Despite their immense power, I do not believe that generative architectures are the path to achieving this true understanding.”
AMI’s first partnership is with Nabla, a healthcare AI startup also headed by LeBrun.
Funding to world-model AI
While the bulk of AI startup funding thus far has gone to LLM-based generative AI giants, investors appear to be turning their attention to funding more companies like AMI that seek to bring artificial intelligence into the physical world. Late last month, Fei-Fei Li’s San Francisco-based World Labs, another startup founded by an AI pioneer to work on foundation models for real-world AI, raised $1 billion in fresh funding.
Fewer large deals for Europe’s AI sector
Global venture funding hit an all-time monthly record in February as OpenAI announced a $110 billion funding round — by far the largest-ever investment in a private company.
As global startup funding has increased in recent quarters, so has concentration into the AI sector and the dominant players, most of which are based in the U.S.
Europe, by comparison, has seen only modest gains in its venture funding growth and just a handful of billion-dollar-plus deals for AI companies, including $2 billion for Paris-based Mistral AI last year and $2 billion for Nscale earlier this week.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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