While the rest of the AI industry races to label its work as “AGI” or “superintelligence,” Alexandre LeBrun, the CEO of Yann LeCun’s world model startup, AMI Labs, avoids the terms altogether. Lebrun said in an interview with TechCrunch that the company doesn’t use terms like “AGI” or “superintelligence” at all.
“We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence,” he said. “Next time we’ll switch to something else.” He isn’t sold on the new label either. “There’s no good definition. What is superintelligence? I don’t know. It’s not a very useful word.”
It’s a pointed stance from a founder sitting at the center of AI’s newest race.
TechCrunch talked to LeBrun while he was in Seoul last week for The International Conference on Machine Learning, where he was scouting for local industrial partners, global companies and researchers. AMI Labs is still pre-product, but it’s already courting robotics, manufacturing and electronics players. A world model, which incorporates physics to predict and work with the real world, needs to prove itself outside the lab, LeBrun explained.
One area where world models are expected to have a large impact is robotics. For now, robots are just running fixed routines, “completely static”, and AI remains “really dumb in the physical world,” LeBrun said.
