'Godfather of AI' Lecun's Startup in Early Investment Talks at 5 Trillion Won Valuation

500 Million Euro Funding Under Discussion... Headquarters to Be Established in Paris, France
Full-Scale Research on "World Model" Set to Begin

Yan Lecun, a New York University professor known as the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence (AI)," is expected to see the newly established startup he is founding after leaving Meta valued at around 3 billion euros (approximately 5.2 trillion won).

Professor Yan Lecun of New York University attending the 55th World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland last January. Photo by Reuters Yonhap News

According to the Financial Times (FT) on December 18 (local time), Professor Lecun plans to launch a new startup called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) early next year and will serve as chairman of the board. AMI Labs has set its valuation target at 3 billion euros and aims to raise an initial 500 million euros based on this goal.

Professor Lecun has consistently maintained that large language models (LLMs), which currently drive the AI boom, are "essentially just technology for predicting the next word," and that it will be difficult for them to reach human-level intelligence. Instead, he has argued that an alternative could be a world model in which AI directly sees, hears, and observes the real world and makes predictions and inferences according to the laws of physics.

The headquarters of AMI Labs is expected to be located in Paris, France, rather than the United States. Professor Lecun, who was born in France, said at an AI event in Paris earlier this month, "Silicon Valley is completely obsessed with LLM-based generative models," adding, "This kind of research should be carried out outside Silicon Valley, here in Paris."

Alexandre Lebrun, founder of the French health tech company Nabla, has been appointed as CEO to oversee the company's operations. Nabla also plans to form a strategic research partnership with AMI Labs.

Meta, where Professor Lecun worked for 12 years as Chief AI Scientist, will not participate as an investor in the new startup but plans to establish a partnership.

Professor Lecun decided to leave Meta and launch a startup after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg set "superintelligence"-AI surpassing human intelligence-as the company's ultimate goal and reorganized related teams. Following the reorganization, Meta appointed Alexander Wang, the founder of Scale AI in his twenties, as Chief AI Officer (CAIO), placing him above Professor Lecun in the hierarchy.

Professor Lecun is regarded as a leading scholar known as the "Godfather of AI" alongside Geoffrey Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto and winner of last year's Nobel Prize in Physics, and Yoshua Bengio, professor at the University of Montreal. The three jointly received the Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of science, in 2018 in recognition of their contributions to the field of AI.