AI pioneer Yann LeCun has raised $1.03 billion (nearly €900 million) and named a new CEO for his new artificial intelligence (AI) startup that will operate partly out of Paris.
The French-American scientist announced the launch of Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) on social media Tuesday
The startup aims to build world models, which are AI systems that learn from real-world data, such as information from sensors and cameras, rather than relying mainly on text prompts, according to the company’s website.
AMI says systems trained on this kind of data could make more accurate predictions about the consequences of their actions, which could help make them safer to use.
The company hopes the technology will be used in industries where “reliability, controllability and safety really matter,” such as automation, wearable devices, robotics and healthcare.
AMI has already made its first senior hires, appointing serial AI entrepreneur Alex LeBrun as CEO and former Meta and Google research scientist Saining Xie as chief science officer.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on social media site X that LeCun “opens a new chapter in artificial intelligence,” with the launch of AMI.
“This is the France of researchers, builders, and the bold. Bravo!” he wrote.
LeCun won the Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in computer science, in 2018 alongside AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, for their work on deep learning, a type of AI that learns patterns from large amounts of data.
According to the company, AMI will operate from Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore.
