One of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence has raised S$1.31 billion (US$1.03 billion) for his startup AMI Labs in a seed funding round supported by Singapore’s investment company Temasek and Shopee owner, Sea.
The fundraising announced on 10 March will support the development of advanced machine intelligence – where AI models are primarily trained with visuals to learn representations of the real world.
AMI Labs said in a statement that its models will be trained in a way “similar to the mental models humans use to reason and guide action”.
“These systems predict how situations evolve, and how actions lead to consequences, so that they can plan sequences of actions under real-world constraints, with an emphasis on safety and reliability,” the firm said.
Large language models, widely used by businesses and individuals, and powering platforms like ChatGPT, draw on large amounts of data to respond to prompts.
Advanced machine intelligence, in comparison, will be “safer and, in a way, more controllable”, AMI Labs executive chairman Yann LeCun said.
He said: “We already have prototypes that basically have some level of common sense.
“If we show the prototypes a video where something impossible occurs, like someone throws a ball and the ball turns into a cube or disappears, the system tells us this is impossible. That puts us on a good trajectory (for progress).”
Dr LeCun, who was formerly the chief AI scientist at Meta until his exit from the tech giant at the end of 2025, is recognised as one of the three “godfathers of AI”.
This came after he received the Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, alongside Dr Geoffrey Hinton and Dr Yoshua Bengio in 2018.
Dr LeCun said the Singapore investment received from funders Temasek and Sea was important for his venture.
“Singapore is a very important location for us. We have quite a lot of links in Singapore, and partners here and in Asia generally. The talent pool is great, too,” he said.
