SBVA (CEO Lee Jun-pyo) announced on the 11th that it had invested approximately KRW 50 billion (EUR 30 million) in the seed round of 'AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence),' a global frontier lab founded by world-renowned AI expert Professor Yann LeCun.
This round was participated by global investment institutions such as Greycroft Partners, Cathay Innovation, and Hiro Capital, as well as NVIDIA, and also received funding from major figures in the IT industry such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.
SBVA executed this investment through the newly established 'Alpha AI Architecture Fund', following the existing '2023 Alpha Korea Fund' and 'Alpha Intelligence Fund', and domestic and foreign companies and institutions participated as limited partners (LPs), laying the foundation for cooperation to expand the next-generation AI architecture industry.
Yann LeCun is the founder of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and a leading scientist in modern deep learning research. He has received major awards, including the Queen Elizabeth II Medal for Engineering and the ACM Turing Award. AMI operates a global AI Frontier Lab, where researchers and engineers from Meta and Google DeepMind work together to combine research and practice.
AMI aims to develop a 'world model' centered on self-supervised learning and joint embedding-based prediction architecture (JEPA), and to implement practical intelligence that enables AI to understand and reason about the world like humans.
As a strategic partner connecting AMI and the Asian industrial ecosystem, SBVA plans to leverage its network of large corporations for technology verification (PoC) and collaboration with companies in the robotics, manufacturing, and AI sectors to lay the foundation for domestic startups to utilize AMI's next-generation world model architecture and enter the global market.
An AMI official said, “SBVA’s participation as a strategic partner encompassing the Asian ecosystem is a good example of AMI’s global vision and goals,” and “This collaboration will be an important turning point in establishing a close cooperative structure in the Asian region, including Korea.”
SBVA Managing Director Jang Yoo-jin said, “AMI is a key company leading the development of a ‘world model’ that understands the physical world,” and added, “This investment will serve as an opportunity to promote the strategic combination of the Korean and Asian industrial ecosystems at a time when the AI industry paradigm is shifting to ‘physical AI.’”
In recent years, the global AI industry has seen a rise in industrial applications and collaborations utilizing next-generation world models and physical AI technologies.
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