Late last year, Yann LeCun left his job as chief A.I. scientist at Meta to launch a start-up.
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 start-up, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, or AMI Labs, has raised over $1 billion in seed funding from investors in the United States, 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 on Tuesday, shows that investors are still willing to make enormous bets on experienced A.I. researchers. Even as many financial analysts and industry insiders warn of an A.I. bubble, investors have poured enormous amounts of money into several new start-ups in recent months, including Project Prometheus, which raised $6.2 billion from Mr. Bezos and others.
Many of these start-ups 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.
Dr. 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 A.I.
Although his research laid the groundwork for large language models, or L.L.M.s — the technology that drives chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — Dr. LeCun has long argued that these systems are not a path to truly intelligent machines. The problem with L.L.M.s, he said, is that they do not plan ahead. Trained solely on digital data, they do not have a way of understanding the complexities of the real world.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
With AMI Labs, Dr. LeCun and his colleagues — many of whom worked with him at Meta — want to build a system that can plan ahead in ways that L.L.M.s cannot.
Alex LeBrun, AMI Labs’ chief executive and a former Meta engineer, said that 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,” Mr. LeBrun told The Times. “We want to help them reach to new situations with more common sense.”
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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