nother world model startup has come out of the gate swinging.

On Tuesday, Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup founded by former Meta Chief Scientist and AI godfather Yann LeCun, announced a more than $1 billion seed funding round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, the largest seed funding round in Europe to date. The round included marquee investors such as Greycroft, Jeff Bezos-owned Bezos Expeditions, Nvidia, Mark Cuban and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Along with the funding, the company announced its talent line-up, several of whom come from Meta. The team includes:

• Alexandre LeBrun, a former Meta AI engineer and founder of healthcare AI firm Nabla, as CEO, Laurent Solly, Meta’s former VP of Europe, as COO, Pascale Fung, former Meta responsible AI consultant, as chief research and innovation Officer, and Michael Rabbat, former research science director at Meta, as VP of world models.
• The founding team also includes Saining Xie, former Google DeepMind research scientist on the Nano Banana team and a leading researcher in visual representation learning, as chief science officer.

In the announcement, AMI Labs said its mission is to build AI systems that understand reality and can operate reliably and safely in the real world, a key hurdle in advancing physical AI and robotics. It fits squarely into LeCun’s long-held belief that AI must go beyond large language models to achieve a human-level understanding of the world.

“As AI begins to move beyond screens, intelligence must go beyond simply producing outputs,” the company said in its press release. “It must understand situations, retain context, anticipate consequences, and act reliably over time.”

AMI Labs’ fundraising round also underscores the growing hype around world models, or AI systems capable of understanding and acting upon the world around us. In mid-February, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, with a mission to “advance spatial intelligence by building world models.” And Runway, a video AI startup, raised $315 million in Series E funding at a $5.3 billion valuation, calling world models the “most transformative technology of our time.”

Our Deeper View

The excitement around world models and physical AI right now is akin to the buzz around LLMs in 2022, gaining traction among investors and attracting talent from big AI labs like Meta and Google. And when things like this are shiny and new, the inclination is to move fast. The problem, however, is that these models are hard to build and even harder to deploy. Additionally, the stakes are high in getting it right: Because these models aim to be the catalyst for physical AI systems, their mistakes have physical consequences. As such, these developers are caught between the desire to build quickly and the necessity to build carefully. So think of world models as a longer-term bet for now.