The billion-dollar startup with a different idea for AI

A billion dollars in startup funding for a company that employs 12 people is an indication that investors still have faith in AI. But the founder of the startup in question – AMI Labs’ Yann LeCun – believes that the breed of technology we currently term AI (large language models) is not the way through which it will develop meaningful and long-term results.

Yann LeCun left his post as chief AI scientist at Meta late last year and founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) which, he asserts, will remain a research organisation not expected to produce a saleable product for maybe five years. The team at AMI Labs are concentrating not on huge, general-purpose language-based models, but AIs that comprise of collections of modular components, trained for and operating in specific use-cases.

LeCun’s proposed system of artificial intelligence would comprise of the following types of elements:

• a world model specific to the domain in which the AI would operate. This might be industry-specific, or perhaps more likely, role-specific,
• an actor that proposes steps to take next, based on classical reinforcement learning,
• a critic that analyses the different ...