One of the people who helped build the foundation of modern artificial intelligence just placed a billion-dollar bet that the industry’s most popular approach is fundamentally wrong.
Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning researcher who spent roughly 12 years leading Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab, has raised $1.03 billion in seed funding for his new venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. That’s approximately €890 million, making it the largest seed round ever recorded in European history, with a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion.
The thesis: LLMs won’t get us to AGI
LeCun’s core argument is deceptively simple. The large language models powering tools like ChatGPT learn by predicting the next word in a sequence. They’re very good at it. But LeCun believes that no matter how much you scale that approach, it will never produce anything resembling true artificial general intelligence.
AMI Labs is instead building what LeCun calls “world models,” systems that learn from the physical world rather than from text on the internet. The company’s focus areas include robotics, healthcare, and industrial applications, the kinds of domains where understanding physics and spatial reasoning matters far more than generating eloquent prose.
