French artificial intelligence startup AMI – co-founded by Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun – announced on Tuesday it had raised US$1 billion to develop models able to understand the physical world.

This first funding round for AMI – which stands for Advanced Machine Intelligence – was carried out by five investment funds and attracted investment from several big groups, including Toyota, Nvidia and Samsung.

Notable names in tech also bought in, among them former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

AMI was valued around US$3.5 billion before this funding round.

LeCun announced his departure from Meta in November, after 12 years with the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

He now serves as AMI's non-executive chairman, while Alexandre Lebrun is the Paris-based startup's CEO.

LeCun said that, with the funding round complete, AMI would now proceed with adding "between 20 and 30" hires "in the very short term".

Along with AMI's five other co-founders, he said he planned to "shift into a higher gear" on developing "world models" – AI systems designed to understand the physical world.

That goal, he added, aims to have AI understand the world "in the way animals and humans do" – unlike the large language models (LLMs) behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Within three to five years, AMI plans to produce "fairly universal intelligent systems" that could be used for almost any task requiring intelligent machines, such as autonomous driving and robotics.

"I am very clearly in the camp that believes we need a paradigm shift" from the AI reliance on LLMs, LeCun said.

The French-American scientist, who continues to be a computer science professor at New York University, said AMI would focus on research and development in its first year. (AFP)



Edited by Thomas McAlinden