Comment by drysine
18 hours ago
Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models.
LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. “The idea that you’re going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they’re going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense,” he said. [0]
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/yann-lecun-raises-dollar1-billio...
Now check how much OpenAI got in their last funding round, and you have your answer.
I don't think it's valid to draw broad conclusions from the funding of a new company vs. an industry leader. If AMI builds something that looks impressive considering the funding they got, then they'll get plenty more in the next round.
He must be trolling.
AI is hands down the most researched topic in CS departments. Of the 10 largest companies (by market cap), only 3 aren't balls-deep in AI R&D. The fastest growing (private or public) companies by revenue are also almost all companies focused primarily on AI (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Scale AI, Nvidia).
And the money isn't even the most important part. It's all about mindshare and collective research time. The architectural concepts can be researched and developed on top of open models, so even individual relatively poor researchers unaffiliated to anything can make breakthroughs.
Even the computing required for the legendary "Attention is all you need" paper could probably be recreated on con-/prosumer hardware in a month's time.
1B is what Microsoft invested in Open AI in 2019[0]. That was enough to get the ball rolling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Creation_of_for-profit_...
Why on earth would you start your ai startup in Paris? Of all places in western Europe it's one of the hardest to find, attract and keep talented people. The wages are super low, housing is high and language is an issue.
Probably because LeCun is from there. But top AI talent needs to be paid top cash and the taxes there are brutal for high earners especially.