What is Advanced Machine Intelligence or AMI Labs?
The Biggest European AI Startup just came out of Stealth.
Thank you for your support on my last article: The U.S. Labor Market and its AI problem. I’ve been writing about AI for well over four years, well before the latest Generative AI craze. A special thanks to Michael Burry who shared the piece. It made my week.
Good Morning,
While I am a contrarian and realist in my coverage of AI as my baseline, there are however times when my own exuberance and optimism for a better path in AI research shines through. An alternative to the deceptive AGI marketing (by Sam Altman) is one of those moments.
To be sure Generative AI has ushered in an era where Artificial intelligence has made substantial progress over the past decade (2017 to 2022 being a fairly nascent period). Predictive and generative systems have transformed how we analyze, retrieve knowledge, and create content at global scale. But this isn’t enough. The Machine Economy ahead will demand more.
Like many of you I’ve been following the criticism around LLMs by the likes of Yann LeCun, Gary Marcus and many others in the last few years. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and a pioneer of modern AI, has become one of the most prominent critics of the current "LLM-centric" path and his alternative is to me fascinating. Instead of AGI they propose Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence, or SAI.
“SAI points toward self-supervised learning for acquiring generic knowledge from unlabeled data, and world models for planning and zero-shot transfer.” - Ravid Shwartz Ziv
The reality is we need a second wave of more practical AI startups that focuses on Physical AI, world models, robotics and real automation and that’s exactly what we are seeing with Prometheus Project, Core Automation, World Labs and many others. AGI startups, World model centric AI startups, Physical AI & robotics startups and physical science AI startups all can push the frontiers.
In this article I explore what the Machine Intelligence Economy will require and in particular try to chart the origins, characteristics and announcement of Europe’s own AMI. I argue that we are moving into a new era of Physical AI, specialized AI startups, robotic brain and world model origin labs. I consider 2027 as the nascent start to the Physical AI era.
“AI agents need world models that allow them to predict the consequences of their actions before they take them. This is key to enabling agents that can plan, remember, and reason about complex observations.” - Michael Rabbat
There’s now in 2026 a second wave of AI startups that are offering complementary directions to the approach of LLMs.
