An AI that «sees» the world: The $1 Billion Bet by Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun made headlines in recent months with his sensational departure from Meta, where he served as head of AI research for twelve years. Now at the helm of Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a startup based in Paris of which he is the president, he can boast of attracting all the investors on the planet. AMI has indeed raised one of the largest funding rounds in Europe, amounting to $1.03 billion, valuing the young company (just a few weeks old) at $3.5 billion.

Give AI a vision

Many fairy godmothers have gathered around the cradle, such as Jeff Bezos's investment fund, Nvidia, Samsung, but also Bpifrance and even Xavier Niel. One has to say that Yann LeCun's pedigree is impressive: at 65 years old, he is indeed regarded as one of the inventors of deep learning. At Meta, he helped expand the technology to the general public.

Now leading AMI, he wants to continue his exploration of artificial vision. Unlike large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which mainly learn to manipulate text, artificial vision ("world models") aims to give machines a better understanding of the physical world.

The idea is to allow an AI to interpret images, movements, or objects, much like a human would when observing their environment. These systems analyze visual streams (with photos, videos, or sensors) to identify shapes, distances, or interactions between objects. This approach is already used in some autonomous cars or in medical imaging, but Yann LeCun believes it must become the basis of future AI.

According to him, a machine capable of visually understanding the world will then be able to act in that world, for example to control a domestic robot, manipulate objects or help design industrial products. AMI does not aim to develop a service or product for the general public; the technology developed by the startup is intended to be sold to companies, such as car manufacturers or robot makers for example.

AMI, whose CEO is Alexandre Lebrun, another former Meta employee, has offices in Paris, but also in New York, Montreal and Singapore. But nothing in San Francisco, and that is intentional. For Yann LeCun, Silicon Valley is a place where « many people and investors are obsessed with LLMs », as he explains at Bloomberg. It is indeed one of the reasons that pushed him to leave Meta, the social media giant having put all its eggs in the same basket of large language models.

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