Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) — the startup founded by former Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun — said it has raised a €890 million financing round from global investors “who believe in our vision of universally intelligent systems centered on world models.”
The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions and other investors and angels across the world.
“AMI is also supported by a group of long-term global investors and strategic backers, including Toyota Ventures, New Legacy Ventures, Temasek, SBVA, NVIDIA, Mark Cuban, Association Familiale Mulliez, Groupe industriel Marcel Dassault, Sea, and Alpha Intelligence Capital,” said AMI.
“Additional significant participation comes from Eric Schmidt, Aglaé Lab, ZEBOX Ventures, Artémis, Xavier Niel, Publicis Groupe, Samsung, Bpifrance Digital Venture, Jim Breyer, Tim & Rosemary Berners-Lee, and Mark Leslie.
“We are a growing team of researchers and builders, operating in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore from day one.”
In an interview with Reuters, LeCun said AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. He added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves.
The company’s near-term target customers are organizations operating complex systems, including manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms and pharmaceutical groups, Reuters reported.
“We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is,” LeCun said.
Over time, he added, the technology could also support consumer applications.
“What consumers could be interacting with is a domestic robot. You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world.”
LeCun said he was also talking with Meta about potentially deploying the technology in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. “That’s probably one of the shorter term potential applications,” he said.