The Godfather of AI Just Left Meta, Started a Company, and Raised $1 Billion Before Lunch

Yann LeCun is not just any AI researcher. He is literally one of the three people who won the Nobel-equivalent award for inventing deep learning, the technology that makes every AI product you use today possible. He spent years as the head of AI at Meta (Facebook). And now he has left to start his own company.

It is called AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs), and it just raised over $1.03 billion from investors including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek. The company is already valued at $3.5 billion and it barely exists yet.

But here is the really interesting part: LeCun thinks everyone else in AI is doing it wrong. While companies like OpenAI and Google are building bigger and bigger chatbots, LeCun is building what he calls "world models." Instead of just predicting the next word in a sentence, these systems learn from the physical world, like how a baby learns by watching and touching things.

If he is right, this could make current AI look like a calculator compared to a smartphone. If he is wrong, well, at least he has a billion dollars to figure it out. As reported by The New York Times and Reuters.

Source: The New York Times