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
- Introduced ResNeXt, showing how grouped convolutions and cardinality could improve deep vision backbones
- Created ConvNeXt, demonstrating that carefully modernized convnets could compete with Vision Transformers
- Co-authored Masked Autoencoders with Kaiming He and colleagues, helping revive self-supervised visual representation learning
- Co-authored Diffusion Transformers, a design line later associated with high-end video generation systems such as Sora
- Co-founded AMI Labs with Yann LeCun to push world-model research beyond language-only systems
- His work shows that architecture details still matter in the transformer era, though popular accounts can over-credit single papers for later product systems
