One of AI’s most influential researchers raised $1.03 billion to back a very different path for the field. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and Meta’s former AI chief, started a company called Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI. It is building systems that predict how the world changes and what happens after an action, known as world models. The company is a direct bet that the next serious step in AI may come from those models.
The money backs LeCun’s view that the approach behind chatbots is not enough. Chatbots such as ChatGPT run on systems trained to predict the next word in a piece of text, known as large language models. He argues that they can produce fluent output but still fall short of real understanding. In reports on the launch, he said that predicting the next word will not by itself produce systems that can reason and plan well in the real world. The same goes for predicting the next pixel in an image.
In a paper titled “A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence,” LeCun argues that AI needs a model of the world that can make predictions. With one, a system could reason, plan and anticipate the consequences of its actions over time.
That changes the kind of work AI is aimed at. Language models are strongest when the task stays within language, but they may not be the full answer for work that depends on cause and effect. World models point to robots, manufacturing, medicine and machines that run on their own. In those settings, a system has to keep track of what is going on in a physical environment, notice changes and respond to them. A chatbot helps generate words. A world model is meant to predict what is likely to happen inside a machine, a process or a physical setting, well enough to act within it.
AMI’s bet drew backers including the chipmaker Nvidia, Jeff Bezos’s investment firm Bezos Expeditions and major venture firms. The round has been described as one of Europe’s largest seed rounds. The company was valued at $3.5 billion before the new money came in, and it had no product on the market.
