Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is tapping Europe to build his new project, a startup focusing on a different approach to AI than the generative models currently developed by Big Tech giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta.
LeCun, a Turing award winner and one of the most influential figures in AI, last month announced in a LinkedIn post he will be leaving Meta at the end of the year to create his own startup.
Speaking about developing new approaches to AI at the AI-Pulse conference in Paris on Thursday, LeCun said: “Silicon Valley is completely hypnotised by generative models, and so you have to do this kind of work outside of Silicon Valley, in Paris.”
The new company will focus on “world models”, systems that can understand the physical world instead of merely generating text like today’s large-language models (LLMs).
Hopes were high that LeCun, who is a French national, would return home from the US to launch the project. LeCun has been a long-time advocate for European AI talent and startups, pushing Meta to open the Facebook AI Research lab (FAIR) in Paris in 2015, where the company’s flagship LLM Llama was eventually created in 2023.
At AI-Pulse LeCun said the startup will be a “global entity” with research organisations around the world, “particularly in Europe where there is a lot of talent, which perhaps does not realise its full potential, and where providing the right environment for this is essential.”
Two sources with direct knowledge told Sifted the company will have several bases worldwide, including in Paris.
World models vs LLMs
LeCun said current text-based LLMs are “missing something big” to achieve human-level intelligence.
“Our best AI systems can pass the bar exam, compose poetry, win international maths olympiads, write code, but we still don’t have a robot that can do what a five-year-old can do,” he said.
“Some people claim we can scale up current technology and get to general intelligence [...] I think that’s bullshit, if you’ll pardon my French.”
Instead of only understanding text, world models will be able to perceive their environments and understand the physical world, he said. This will be enabled by a new type of AI architecture, which is “non-generative”, and could open “a whole new world of applications.”
Meta will be a partner to the project, dubbed AMI (advanced machine intelligence).
“It’s a project Mark Zuckerberg really likes,” said LeCun. “But over the last several months he and I both realised the potential spectrum of applications was beyond what Meta was interested in, so it became clear to me it was the right time to make an independent organisation.”
