Saining Xie
Co-founder & CSO, AMI Labs
About
Saining Xie (谢赛宁) is co-founder and Chief Science Officer at AMI Labs, a company he co-founded with Yann LeCun to build world models that go beyond large language models. He is also an assistant professor at NYU's Courant Institute on leave. Xie received his Ph.D. from UC San Diego, spent four years as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), and later joined Google DeepMind's GenAI team. His research focuses on scalable visual representation learning, generative modeling, and multimodal understanding. AMI Labs raised a $1.03B seed round in March 2026.
Key Contributions
- Co-authored DiT (Diffusion Transformers), the architecture behind OpenAI's Sora
- Introduced ResNeXt, a widely-adopted vision backbone for deep learning
- Created ConvNeXt, showing convnets can match Vision Transformers
- Co-authored MAE (Masked Autoencoders) with Kaiming He at FAIR
- Co-founded AMI Labs with Yann LeCun, raising a $1.03B seed round in 2026
