Yann LeCun’s Paris A.I. Startup AMI Labs Raises Record $1B Seed Round

In November, Yann LeCun left Meta after 12 years over disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg over the future of A.I. Frustrated with the limitations of large language models (LLMs), the French computer scientist founded AMI Labs, a Paris-based startup focused on developing “world models.” The startup announced today (March 10) that it has raised $1 billion in what is Europe’s largest-ever seed round.

The funding values AMI at $3.5 billion pre-money and includes an array of high-profile backers such as Nvidia, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos, who co-led the round alongside venture capital firms Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, and HV Capital. LeCun will serve as executive chairman, guiding AMI’s long-term goal of building A.I. systems capable of understanding complex real-world data.

LeCun has hired Alex LeBrun, his former colleague at Meta, as CEO of AMI.  LeBrun previously worked on Meta’s Fundamental A.I. Research (FAIR) team, which LeCun led for more than a decade. He also co-founded Nabla, a startup that builds A.I. tools for clinicians.

In a LinkedIn post today, LeBrun explained that “world models,” unlike current LLMs, can predict the consequences of actions and plan sequences to accomplish tasks. “AMI will advance A.I. research and develop applications where reliability, controllability, and safety really matter,” he wrote, citing areas such as automation, robotics, healthcare and wearable devices.

LeCun, who moved from France to the U.S. in the 1980s to work at AT&T Bell Laboratories, became a foundational figure in machine learning. He earned the 2018 Turing Award for groundbreaking work in neural networks.

His departure from Meta last November followed his public criticism of LLMs as a “dead end” for achieving truly intelligent systems. The move coincided with Meta’s internal restructuring around Alexandr Wang, the 29-year-old founder and former CEO of Scale AI, who now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). LeCun has been critical of Wang’s leadership, calling him “inexperienced.” Despite their split, LeCun has said AMI could one day collaborate with Meta on projects like its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Other key members of AMI’s founding team include Saining Xie, a computer science professor at New York University who will serve as the startup’s chief science officer. Former Meta executives Laurent Solly and Michael Rabbat are stepping up as AMI’s chief operating officer and vice president of world models, respectively. Pascale Fung, an engineering professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is the startup’s chief research and innovation officer.

The company is also hiring across offices in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.

According to PitchBook, AMI’s $1 billion raise is Europe’s largest seed round to date and marks another milestone in the fast-evolving world models sector. Other key players include Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, which raised $1 billion last month, and General Intuition, which raised $134 million in October.

World models, or A.I. systems trained to simulate and reason about physical environments rather than just generate text, are attracting growing interest from researchers skeptical that LLMs can understand reality. AMI plans to focus first on advancing world model research before pursuing commercial applications, with early use cases likely in factories and hospitals.

One of AMI’s first external partners will be Nabla, where LeBrun will remain chairman and chief A.I. scientist. The partnership will give Nabla early access to AMI’s research, testing how world model-based A.I. performs in the fast-paced, high-stakes setting of clinical care.