A 7-hour marathon interview with Saining Xie: World Models, AMI Labs, Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li, and 42

Description

In the spring of 2026, as China celebrated the Chinese New Year with humanoid robots dancing on the national stage, New York was reeling from a brutal blizzard—the harshest winter the city had seen in years. In a cluttered apartment in Brooklyn, my conversation with Saining Xie began. By March 2026, Xie, alongside Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun, had embarked on a high-stakes venture into "World Models." Their brainchild, AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs), consists of just 25 people and zero products. Yet, it has already secured a $1.03 billion Seed round at a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion. This is the titan among 2026’s "AI Neo Labs," setting a record for the largest Seed round in European history. Statistically, its initial funding ranks second globally among Neo Labs, trailing only Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati ($2 billion Seed). "Silicon Valley is very LLM-pilled," says Xie, AMI’s co-founder and Chief Science Officer. "The Valley is deep in the trenches of Large Language Models—it’s completely hypnotized." Born in 1990, the Chinese scientist is an alumnus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and UC San Diego, and currently holds a faculty position at NYU. Before venturing into the startup world, he was a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and spent four years at Meta’s FAIR. With nearly 100,000 citations to his name, he is best known for co-authoring Diffusion Transformers (DiT). This is Xie’s first-ever in-depth interview. On a snowy afternoon in February 2026, we began what turned into an unexpected marathon, starting at 2 PM and only dispersing in the early hours of the morning. Under the neon-soaked, pitch-black streets of New York, Xie’s rhetoric echoed the city’s own grit—a complex blend of sharpness and nuance. When it comes to the prevailing AI dogma, he doesn't pull his punches: - "I don’t see LLMs as a success story for the 'Bitter Lesson'—in fact, they are a rebellion against it." - "There is significant 'water'—inflation—in the Scaling Laws