The latest funding round gives the start-up a valuation of $3.5bn, despite having only been established less than three months ago.
Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), which is an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up founded by former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, has announced the raising of more than $1bn in seed funding. The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
AMI was also supported by long-term global investors and strategic backers such as Toyota Ventures, New Legacy Ventures, Temasek, SBVA, NVIDIA, Mark Cuban, Association Familiale Mulliez, Groupe industriel Marcel Dassault, Sea, and Alpha Intelligence Capital. Samsung and Bpifrance Digital Venture were also among the significant participants.
The funds raised are being used to develop AMI and according to the organisation, the building of a new “breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan and are controllable and safe”. AMI has also stated that the platform is growing its team of researchers and builders, in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.
Established earlier this year and based in Paris, France, AMI explained that the company is developing ‘world models’ that learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data, ignore unpredictable details and make predictions in representation space. According to AMI, world models allow agentic systems to predict the consequences of their actions and plan action sequences that accomplish tasks.
Despite being a young start-up, AMI has already reached a valuation of $3.5bn, which is perhaps indicative of a marketplace that is moving towards greater recognition of nascent projects that explore physical space. In January of this year, Fei-Fei Li, the ‘godmother of AI’, was reported to be in talks to raise a major investment that would value her start-up World Labs at $5bn.
World Labs describes itself as a “spatial intelligence company, building frontier models that can perceive, generate, reason and interact with the 3D world”. It describes its AI products as “large world models”.
Commenting on the potential of world models, Alexandre LeBrun, the AMI Labs CEO, told TechCrunch, “My prediction is that ‘world models’ will be the next buzzword. In six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding.”
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