Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03 billion to build world models that understand reality

Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03 billion to build world models | TechCrunch

AMI Labs, the new venture cofounded by Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun after he left Meta, has raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. AMI is working on world models, or AI that learns from reality, not just from language. This category has fewer players than generative AI, but maybe not for long. "My prediction is that 'world models' will be the next buzzword," AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun told TechCrunch. "In six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding." LeBrun said this with a smile because he thinks AMI Labs is fundamentally different: its goal is to understand the real world. This could have applications in healthcare, where AMI Labs' first partner will be Nabla, the digital health startup of which he's now chairman. As CEO of Nabla, LeBrun had reached the same conclusion as LeCun on the limitations of large language models (LLMs) where hallucinations could have life-threatening repercussions. But he also knows it will take a while for the startup to offer a viable alternative based on JEPA, the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture proposed by LeCun in 2022. "AMI Labs is a very ambitious project, because it starts with fundamental research. It's not your typical applied AI startup that can release a product in three months, have revenue in six months and make $10 million in [annual recurring revenue] in 12 months," LeBrun said. In contrast, it could take years for world models to go from theory to commercial applications. Despite this time horizon, companies developing world models have attracted big checks. SpAItial raised a $13 million seed round -- unusually large for a European startup; while Fei-Fei Li's World Labs secured a whopping $1 billion last month alone. Now, AMI Labs joins the club with more funding than initially rumored. The French AI lab was reportedly seeking just €500 million last December, but ended up raising some €890 million, likely thanks to its team. In addition to LeCun's involvement as chairman and to LeBrun's track record as an entrepreneur, it also boasts Meta's VP for Europe Laurent Solly as COO, and high-profile researchers Saining Xie as chief science officer, Pascale Fung as chief research & innovation officer and Michael Rabbat as VP of world models. According to LeBrun, high interest gave the startup a chance to have its pick of investors, both in terms of expectation alignment and background. The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with participation from several other funds and industry-tied backers, as well as individuals including Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee, Jim Breyer, Mark Cuban, Mark Leslie, Xavier Niel and Eric Schmidt. Value-add aside, this funding will give AMI Labs some meaningful runway to bankroll its two main cost centers: compute and talent. LeBrun said he will prioritize quality over quantity to build AMI Labs' team in four key locations: Paris, where it is headquartered; New York, where LeCun teaches at NYU; in Montreal, where its Rabbat is based; and in Singapore, both to recruit AI talent and to be close to future clients in Asia. Although AMI Labs has no plans to generate revenue for the time being, it still plans to engage with prospective customers early on. "We are developing world models that seek to understand the world, and you can't do that locked up in a lab. At some point, we need to put the model in a real-world situation with real data and real evaluations," LeBrun said. When the time comes, AMI Labs will turn to partners to explore deployments -- and Nabla is the first disclosed partner expecting to access these early models, but definitely not the last. "This may explain the presence and strong interest of certain industrial players and potential partners in the investment round," LeBrun said. In addition to its lead investors and angels, AMI Labs is backed by NVIDIA, Samsung, Sea, Temasek and Toyota Ventures, as well as French players Association Familiale Mulliez, Groupe Industriel Marcel Dassault and Publicis Groupe. Aglaé Lab, Alpha Intelligence Capital, Artémis, Bpifrance Digital Venture, New Legacy Ventures, SBVA and ZEBOX Ventures also participated. These investments may take a while to turn into commercial applications. But staying true to LeCun's beliefs, AMI Labs will publish papers as it goes. "We will also make a lot of code open source," said LeBrun, who had also worked at Meta's AI research laboratory, FAIR. While open research is "increasingly rare," this startup's founders still believe in it. "We think things move faster when they're open, and it's in our best interest to build a community and a research ecosystem around us."

Yann LeCun Raises $1 Billion to Build AI That Understands the Physical World

Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models. LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. "The idea that you're going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they're going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense," he said in an interview with WIRED. The financing, which values the startup at $3.5 billion, was co-led by investors such as Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable backers include Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French billionaire and telecommunications executive Xavier Niel. AMI (pronounced like the French word for friend) aims to build "a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe," the company says in a press release. The startup says it will be global from day one, with offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore, and New York, where LeCun will continue working as a New York University professor in addition to leading the startup. AMI will be the first commercial endeavor for LeCun since his departure from Meta in November 2025. LeCun's startup represents a bet against many of the world's biggest AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and even his former workplace, Meta, which believe that scaling up LLMs will eventually deliver AI systems with human-level intelligence or even superintelligence. LLMs have powered viral products such as ChatGPT and Claude Code, but LeCun has been one of the AI industry's most prominent researchers speaking out about the limitations of these AI models. LeCun is well known for being outspoken, but as a pioneer of modern AI that won a Turing award back in 2018, his skepticism carries weight. LeCun says AMI aims to work with companies in manufacturing, biomedical, robotics, and other industries that have lots of data. For example, he says AMI could build a realistic world model of an aircraft engine and work with the manufacturer to help them optimize for efficiency, minimize emissions, or ensure reliability. AMI was cofounded by LeCun and several leaders he worked with at Meta, including the company's former director of research science, Michael Rabbat; former vice president of Europe, Laurent Solly; and former senior director of AI research, Pascale Fung. Other cofounders include Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of the AI health care startup Nabla, who will serve as AMI's CEO, and Saining Xie, a former Google DeepMind researcher who will be the startup's chief science officer. LeCun does not dismiss the overall utility of LLMs. Rather, in his view, these AI models are simply the tech industry's latest promising trend, and their success has created a "kind of delusion" among the people who build them. "It's true that [LLMs] are becoming really good at generating code, and it's true that they are probably going to become even more useful in a wide area of applications where code generation can help," says LeCun. "That's a lot of applications, but it's not going to lead to human-level intelligence at all." LeCun has been working on world models for years inside of Meta, where he founded the company's Fundamental AI Research lab, FAIR. But he's now convinced his research is best done outside the social media giant. He says it's become clear to him that the strongest applications of world models will be selling them to other enterprises, which doesn't fit neatly into Meta's core consumer business. As AI world models like Meta's Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) became more sophisticated, "there was a reorientation of Meta's strategy where it had to basically catch up with the industry on LLMs and kind of do the same thing that other LLM companies are doing, which is not my interest," says LeCun. "So sometime in November, I went to see Mark Zuckerberg and told him. He's always been very supportive of [world model research], but I told him I can do this faster, cheaper, and better outside of Meta. I can share the cost of development with other companies ... His answer was, OK, we can work together."

Yann LeCun's New AI Startup Raises $1 Billion in Seed Funding

Yann LeCun, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, has raised $1.03 billion for a nascent startup that promises to invent technology more capable of navigating the real world than existing AI products like ChatGPT. The startup, which is not yet three months old, is called Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI, and reached a valuation of $3.5 billion in the funding round, not including dollars raised. Based in Paris, the company's investors include major tech companies like Nvidia Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. as well as global investors Cathay Innovation, Jeff Bezos' investment office Bezos Expeditions, Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. The deal is one of the largest first funding rounds ever in Europe -- and the latest example of an AI luminary raising gobs of cash for a nascent research project after leaving a larger company. LeCun, who is co-founder and chairman at AMI, is revered as one of the "godfathers" of AI, credited for developing some of the algorithmic techniques that birthed modern chatbots and image-recognition systems. The French computer scientist ran research for Meta Platforms Inc. for years as the company's chief AI scientist. But since leaving Meta in 2025, LeCun has become a vocal critic of large language models -- the text-based systems behind ChatGPT and Meta's Llama -- as the best method to advance AI. With AMI, LeCun said the startup intentionally did not open up an office in Silicon Valley because it's "where a lot of the people and money are LLM-pilled." The ultimate goal, LeCun said in an interview, is to develop a "universal intelligence system" that can power anything from domestic robots to self-driving cars. AMI is one of several new startups building AI models to understand the physical world, beyond written text. For proponents, the method is a key ingredient for making the intelligent, futuristic robots that tech companies have long struggled to crack. While many of the startups in the sector are still focused on research versus commercialization, they've found eager investors willing to bet on the next frontier in the field. Fei-Fei Li, another pioneering AI scientist, recently co-founded a similar company called World Labs that quickly reached a $5 billion valuation. Alex LeBrun, a former Meta AI researcher and chief executive officer for French health tech startup Nabla Technologies, will serve as AMI's CEO. AMI doesn't plan to launch a consumer product, but instead will spend most of this year in research and development before partnering with large enterprises. LeCun said the startup is targeting industries that need to rely on AI models to make hardware and other physical goods, like cars, aerospace and pharmaceuticals. He also said that the company has had discussions with Meta about possible partnerships to use AMI's technology in its wearable devices. "There could be some products that get in the hands of consumers fairly early, depending on how the technology progresses," he said. While LeCun says that the defense industry is "not a focus," one of his investors is a unit of fighter jet manufacturer Dassault Aviation SA. The use of AI in the military is a hot button topic in Silicon Valley following the standoff between Anthropic and the US Defense Department. On Monday, Anthropic sued the Pentagon after the agency declared that the AI developer was a supply chain risk. LeCun, a frequent critic of Donald Trump, said elected officials should determine how AI systems are used in the military, not researchers or companies making the tech. "At least, I don't see myself as having any legitimacy deciding what society should do with the technology that we develop," he said. In addition to its Paris headquarters, AMI also has offices in New York, Montreal and Singapore. LeCun said it currently has a staff of about 20. Like other European AI developers, LeCun said that its global reach would be an advantage. "There is a lot of demand from the industry, from governments around the world, for a credible provider of AI technology that is neither American nor Chinese," he said. LeCun, who is French, helped set up Facebook's research lab in Paris and has advised several startups in the country, including OpenAI competitor Mistral. His new startup has raised from several investors in the country, including Bpifrance Digital Venture as well as several French tycoons, including telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. French media firm Publicis Groupe also participated in the round. Bloomberg earlier reported on partnership discussions between Meta and AMI as well as the startup's plans to raise at a valuation north of $3 billion.

Yann LeCun's AI start-up raises more than $1bn in Europe's largest seed round

Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Meta's former chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun has raised more than $1bn for his new start-up in Europe's largest ever seed funding round. Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs announced on Tuesday that its first fundraising included backing from a global group of investors. These include France's Cathay Innovation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, Seoul-based SBVA and US chip giant Nvidia. The $1.03bn seed round is second only to US start-up Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2bn last June, according to data from Dealroom. The new venture has a pre-money valuation of $3.5bn. It will be led by Alexandre LeBrun, former chief executive of French start-up Nabla, with LeCun serving as executive chair. Laurent Solly, who was Meta's vice-president for Europe, is joining as the chief operating officer. The company is launching with a dozen employees across offices in Paris, New York, Singapore and Montreal. The record-breaking fundraising underscores rising interest among investors in new approaches to AI that go beyond today's large language models. LeCun, a French-US scientist and Turing Award winner, has argued that systems trained mainly on text will struggle to achieve human-level reasoning. Instead, he is building "world models" that understand the physical environment with potential applications in robotics and transport. The start-up will build on work by LeCun at Meta on new AI "architecture" that can learn about the world through videos and spatial data rather than just language. These models are designed to retain memory and reason and to plan complex action sequences. "Anything that involves understanding the real world, we think large language models, and generative AI in general, is not the right solution," said chief executive LeBrun. "We have at least a year of research before deploying our first real-world applications. But this is not an applied AI company." It is part of a global race among venture investors to identify the next big AI giant, following the success of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. In 2025, AI companies attracted about 48 per cent of global venture fundraising, which reached $469bn, according to CB Insights. This meant AI start-ups alone raised roughly $225bn last year. AMI Labs' launch is the latest in a string of high-profile AI funding rounds in Europe this year. They include AI cloud provider Nscale, which announced a $2bn funding round on Monday, video AI start-up Synthesia and secretive AI chip start-up Olix. Last month, the FT reported that David Silver, one of Britain's top AI researchers, is in discussions to raise $1bn in a round led by Sequoia Capital for his new venture Ineffable Intelligence. "We want to be a global company . . . [and] the round structure reflects the way we want to build," LeBrun said. "There is incredible talent elsewhere, outside Silicon Valley." His former company Nabla will be the start-up's first partner, applying its new models in the healthcare industry, LeBrun added. LeCun's ex-employer Meta is not an investor in his new company but will form a "partnership" with AMI Labs that will grant the tech giant access to the technology it can commercialise. LeBrun said discussions around the details of the partnership were continuing. "Most of the large [AI] companies are in a race to improve a little bit, and they are right to do so, as they can't afford to lose the race," he said. "But we are starting in a completely new track . . . which is like a dream."

Ex-Meta AI chief Yann LeCun's AMI raises $1.03 billion for alternative AI approach

March 10 (Reuters) - Advanced Machine Intelligence, the startup founded by former Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, said on Tuesday it raised $1.03 billion based on a $3.50 billion pre-money valuation, as it seeks to commercialize artificial intelligence systems built around reasoning, planning and "world models." The financing positions the company as a test of LeCun's belief that today's large language models fall short of human-level reasoning and autonomy. The funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Meanwhile, ⁠Meta (META.O), opens new tab has been intensifying its push into LLM development. In June 2025, the company reorganized its AI efforts under a division called Meta Superintelligence Labs led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. LeCun joined Meta in 2013 to found Facebook AI Research, later known as FAIR, and became one of the company's most prominent AI leaders before departing at the end of 2025. In an interview with Reuters, LeCun said AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. He ⁠added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves. The company's near-term target customers are organizations operating complex systems, including manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms and pharmaceutical groups. "We want to become ⁠the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is," LeCun said. Over time, he added, the technology could also support consumer applications. "What consumers could be interacting with is ⁠a domestic robot. You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world." LeCun said he was also talking ⁠with Meta about potentially deploying the technology in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. "That's probably one of the shorter term potential applications," he said. Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Ex-Meta AI chief Yann LeCun's AMI raises $1.03 billion for alternative AI approach

AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings, LeCun said in an interview with Reuters. He added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves. Advanced Machine Intelligence, the startup founded by former Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, said on Tuesday it raised $1.03 billion based on a $3.50 billion pre-money valuation, as it seeks to commercialize artificial intelligence systems built around reasoning, planning and "world models." The financing positions the company as a test of LeCun's belief that today's ⁠large language ⁠models fall short of human-level reasoning and autonomy. The funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Meanwhile, Meta has been intensifying its push into LLM development. In June 2025, the company reorganized its AI efforts under a division called Meta Superintelligence Labs led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. LeCun joined Meta ⁠in 2013 to found Facebook AI Research, later known as FAIR, and became one of the company's most prominent AI leaders before ⁠departing at the end of 2025. In an interview with Reuters, LeCun said AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. He added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves. The company's near-term target customers are organizations operating complex systems, including manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms and pharmaceutical groups. "We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is," LeCun said. Over time, he ⁠added, the technology could also support consumer applications. "What consumers could be interacting with is a domestic robot. You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world." LeCun said he was also talking with Meta about potentially deploying the technology in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. "That's probably one of the shorter term potential applications," he said.

Ex-Meta AI chief Yann LeCun's AMI raises $1.03 billion for alternative AI approach

March 10 (Reuters) - Advanced Machine Intelligence, the startup founded by former Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, said on Tuesday it raised $1.03 billion based on a $3.50 billion pre-money valuation, as it seeks to commercialize artificial intelligence systems built around reasoning, planning and "world models." The financing positions the company as a test of LeCun's belief that today's large language models fall short of human-level reasoning and autonomy. The funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Meanwhile, Meta has been intensifying its push into LLM development. In June 2025, the company reorganized its AI efforts under a division called Meta Superintelligence Labs led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. LeCun joined Meta in 2013 to found Facebook AI Research, later known as FAIR, and became one of the company's most prominent AI leaders before departing at the end of 2025. In an interview with Reuters, LeCun said AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. He added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves. The company's near-term target customers are organizations operating complex systems, including manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms and pharmaceutical groups. "We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is," LeCun said. Over time, he added, the technology could also support consumer applications. "What consumers could be interacting with is a domestic robot. You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world." LeCun said he was also talking with Meta about potentially deploying the technology in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. "That's probably one of the shorter term potential applications," he said. (Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)