"The entire industry is digging the same trench"

San Francisco, Berlin. Yann LeCun, former senior AI researcher at Meta, announced details of his start-up AMI Labs this week with a first round of financing totalling 890 million euros - an unusually high level of early funding for a European start-up. According to LeCun, it was therefore no longer referred to as a classic seed round but as a "coconut" round by those involved.

With AMI Labs, LeCun wants to develop AI models for robots and industry, so-called world models. However, he believes that language models (LLMs), such as those used in AI chatbots like ChatGPT, are a dead end. They would "not lead to intelligence on a human level", says LeCun in an interview with Handelsblatt. He considers scenarios according to which artificial intelligence could threaten humanity to be exaggerated. "Since I don't consider these systems to be intelligent, I don't see them as dangerous."

His attitude towards LLMs was one of the reasons why he left the Facebook Group at the end of last year. In this interview, LeCun explains why he considers the AI industry to be strategically short-sighted, why he accuses Anthropic boss Dario Amodei of regulatory interference - and why Europe could have an advantage in the next phase of AI development.

Read the interview with Yann LeCun here:

1ST AMI

Mr LeCun, on Tuesday you presented your eagerly awaited start-up AMI. What exactly are you planning to do?
The plan for the next few weeks is to hire great AI talent who are excited and motivated by the vision and our journey. We have already started and are now aiming to build the world's best AI team.

What are the next steps, which customers and partners have you acquired?
It is still too early to give details here. We are planning industrial partnerships in which we share selected research advances with key global companies in various sectors, including robotics, wearable devices and industrial manufacturing. But this will only start in the coming months.

AMI has been extremely secret until now. Can you tell us more?
The CEO of AMI is Alex Lebrun. After he sold one of his companies to Facebook in 2015, we were colleagues for a while. For the last seven years, he was the founder and CEO of Nabla, a French AI company in the healthcare sector. And now we are starting something new with a great team.

You raised around 890 million euros in your financing round, an unusually high sum for Europe.
It is true that our financing round is very large. It was actually supposed to be a seed round.(Editor's note: A seed round is the term used for start-up financing).