FuturePlay Invests in AI Luminary Yann LeCun's "AMI Labs"

FuturePlay's Investment Driven by AMI Labs' Team Composition
Yann LeCun as Chairman, Wit.ai Founder Appointed as CEO

FuturePlay announced on the 19th that it has participated as an investor in the first funding round of AMI Labs, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup led by world-renowned AI scholar and Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, professor at New York University.

AMI Labs, headquartered in Paris, France, recently secured a seed investment of 1.03 billion dollars (approximately 1.5 trillion won). With this round, AMI Labs achieved a corporate valuation of over 3 billion euros (approximately 4.5 trillion won) from its inception.

AMI Labs presents an approach called the "World Model" to address the limitations of large language model (LLM)-centric generative AI. In particular, it is based on the "Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture" (JEPA) proposed by Professor LeCun. Rather than generating all information directly, JEPA learns the core structure of information within an abstract representation space and predicts the future. Through this, the company aims to improve the computational inefficiency and the limitations in physical understanding found in existing models.

One of the main reasons for the investment is the composition of the AMI Labs team. Professor LeCun serves as chairman of the board, overseeing research direction and technological vision, while Alex Lebrun—who founded the voice recognition startup Wit.ai and sold it to Meta Platforms—serves as CEO. The research team includes researchers from Meta AI, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI.

FuturePlay decided to invest, foreseeing that AMI Labs' technology will become a core technology not only in software but also across next-generation industries that interact with the physical world, such as robotics, autonomous systems, and physics-based AI.

Sung Yunmo, Senior Investment Manager at FuturePlay, who led the investment, stated, "World model technology, which goes beyond language models to understand and autonomously plan for the physical world, is an essential gateway toward true autonomous intelligence. We are excited to join the journey of next-generation AI innovation together with the AMI Labs team, which stands at the pinnacle of global AI technology."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.