Turing Award winner Yann LeCun has launched Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a Paris-based venture betting against the current AI industry obsession with large language models. He argues LLMs are limited to text manipulation and lack true world understanding.

LeCun, who left Meta's FAIR lab, champions world models and his JEPA architecture as the path to human-level intelligence. He criticizes closed AI from OpenAI and Anthropic, advocating open-source platforms that allow diverse cultural and political fine-tuning, avoiding a future dominated by US or Chinese models.

AMI aims to build AI that learns physical world dynamics like a baby, not just language. The company positions itself as a sovereign European alternative, leveraging local talent. Investors are backing the open-source vision, seeing it as critical for startups that can't afford proprietary model costs.