Yann LeCun, often hailed as one of the "fathers of AI," has declared that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have reached their limits. In a bold move, he has launched a new company, AMI Labs, with approximately ¥150 billion (over $1.1 billion) in funding—one of the largest AI startup raises in Europe. AMI Labs aims to build a "world model," a next-generation AI system that can understand and interact with the physical world, going beyond the text-based limitations of current LLMs.
LeCun argues that LLMs, which learn from massive text datasets, lack true understanding of the world and cannot reason about causality, physics, or common sense. The world model approach seeks to create AI that learns from sensory data and can predict the consequences of actions, much like how humans and animals learn.
This announcement has sent ripples through the AI community, challenging the prevailing assumption that scaling up LLMs alone will lead to artificial general intelligence.