The Financial Times (FT) reported on the 18th (local time) that Yann LeCun, a New York University professor who served as chief AI scientist at Meta, Facebook's parent company, has begun raising €500 million (about 860 billion won) to found an AI startup. The market is said to be valuing LeCun's startup at €3 billion (about 5.2 trillion won).
FT, citing sources, said LeCun, known as the "AI lend," plans to establish Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) in Paris, France, early next year. LeCun will serve as chair of the board, and he decided to bring on Alexandre Lebrun, founder of the French Healthtech startup Nabla, as AMI Labs' chief executive officer (CEO).
LeCun plans to focus at AMI Labs on research and commercialization of "world models," AI models that understand the physical world. LeCun has said that large language models (LLMs), which are driving the current Generative AI boom, are merely technologies that predict the next word and therefore cannot acquire the ability to reason and plan like humans. As an alternative to LLMs, he has proposed world models in which AI directly observes the world like people and understands and predicts the physical laws of the real world.
AMI Labs is expected to be headquartered in Paris, France, rather than the United States. LeCun, who was born in France, said at an AI-related event in Paris earlier this month, "Silicon Valley is completely immersed in (LLM-based) AI models," adding, "So this work must be done outside Silicon Valley, in Paris."
Meta, where LeCun worked for 12 years, will not join as an investor, but it plans to sign a partnership with AIM Labs, according to sources.
LeCun's departure from Meta came as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg overhauled the company's AI strategy to develop more powerful LLM-based AI models to compete with rivals such as OpenAI and Google. During the reorganization, Meta hired Alexander Wang, the founder of Scale AI in his 20s, and appointed him as chief AI officer (CAIO), LeCun's superior.
LeCun is a leading scholar known as the "AI lend," along with Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto professor who won the Nobel Prize in physics last year, and Yoshua Bengio, a Université de Montréal professor. The three jointly won the Turing Award in 2018, known as the Nobel Prize of computer science, in recognition of their achievements in AI.