Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

sofixa

Alternative free to read article: https://sifted.eu/articles/yann-lecun-ami-labs-meta-funding-...

sofixa

If he's right (that LLMs cannot achieve AGI, but what he's working on can, and does), this would be huge for AI and humanity at large. Hope it puts to bed the "Europe can't innovate" crowd too.

kerlap10

What use is it to understand the physical world if all investments are misallocated to the virtual world? Perhaps the AI will detect that there is a housing shortage and politicians will finally believe it because AI said so? Or is it to accelerate Skynet?

pingou

Yann LeCun said a number of things that are very dubious, like autoregressive LLMs are a dead end, LLMs do not have an internal world model, and this morning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFi1TPiB058 (in french) that an IA cannot find a strategy to preserve itself against the will of its creator. As a french, I wish him good luck anyway, I'm all for exploring different avenues of achieving AGI.

fennecfoxy

Why world model? To emulate how we became sentient? A "world" is just senses. In a way the context is one sense. A digital only world is still a world. I think more success is in a model having high level needs and aspirations that are borne from lower level needs. Model architecture also needs to shift to multiple autonomous systems that interact, in the same ways our brains work - there's a lot under the surface inside our heads, it's not just "us" in there. We only interact with our environment because of our low level needs, which are primarily: food, water. Secondary: mating. Tertiary: social/tribal credit (which can enable food, water and mating).

abmmgb

Not based on true valuation unless h-index has become a valuation metric lol Academics don’t always make great entrepeneurs

A_D_E_P_T

Justifiable. There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models. LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (grounded in spatiotemporal understanding, not just language patterns) would be attacking what I see as the actual bottleneck to AGI. Even if they succeed only partially, they may unlock the kind of generalization and creative spark that current LLMs structurally can't reach.

general1465

Here you can see why it is so hard to compete as European startup with US startups - abysmal access to money. Investment of 1B USD in Europe is glorified as largest seed ever, but in USA it is another Tuesday.

rvz

Once again, US companies and VCs are in this seed round. Just like Mistral with their seed round. Europe again missing out, until AMI reaches a much higher valuation with an obvious use case in robotics. Either AMI reaches over $100B+ valuation (likely) or it becomes a Thinking Machines Lab with investors questioning its valuation. (very unlikely since world models has a use-case in vision and robotics)

insydian

As someone in the tech twitter sphere this is yann and his ideas performing a suplex on LLM based companies. It is completely unfathomable to start an ai research company… Only sell off 20% and have 1 billion for screwing around for a few years.

whyleyc

https://archive.is/TEwfi

mentalgear

Adds up : We are seeing a clear exodus of both capital and talent from the US - with the current US administration’s shift toward cronyism - and the EU stands as the most compelling alternative with a uniform market of 500 million people and the last major federation truly committed to the rule of law.

ZeroCool2u

Regardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI, this is probably a good thing for Europe. We need more well capitalized labs that aren't US or China centric and while I do like Mistral, they just haven't been keeping up on the frontier of model performance and seem like they've sort of pivoted into being integration specialists and consultants for EU corporations. That's fine and they've got to make money, but fully ceding the research front is not a good way to keep the EU competitive.

fs111

https://archive.is/20260310070651/https://www.ft.com/content...

Oras

> But this is not an applied AI company. There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything. It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it. Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have already done, and they are getting pretty good (see Seedance, Kling, Sora .. etc). So I'm not quite sure how what he proposed would work.

npn

I wish him luck. Recently all papers are about LLM, it brings up fatigue. As GPT is almost reaching its limit, new architecture could bring out new discovery.

margorczynski

He couldn't achieve at least parity with LLMs during his days at Meta (and having at his disposal billions in resources most probably) but he'll succeed now? What is the pitch?

mkl

Seems like it's the second largest seed round anywhere after Thinking Machines Labs? https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-seed-round-ai-th... That article is from June 2025 so may be out of date, and the definition of "seed round" is a bit fuzzy.

sylware

If, for even 1s, they get in a position which is threatening, in any way, Big Tech AI (mostly US based if not all), they will be raided by international finance to be dismantled and poached hardcore with some massive US "investment funds" (which looks more and more as "weaponized" international finance!!). Only china is very immune to international finance. Those funds have tens of thousands of billions of $, basically, in a world of money, there is near zero resistance.

itigges22

I just saw a post from Yann mentioning that AMI Labs is hiring too!