
Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning AI researcher who spent years as Meta's chief AI scientist, has raised Europe's largest-ever seed round for his new start-up. LeCun’s Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs raised $1.03 billion from backers including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, France's Cathay Innovation, and Seoul-based SBVA. The round is second only to U.S. start-up Thinking Machines Lab, which raised a $2 billion seed round last June, according
to The Financial Times. LeCun's Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs is now valued at $3.5 billion pre-money.
The company's central bet is that large language models are the wrong tool for building truly intelligent systems. LeCun has long argued that text-trained models can't achieve human-level reasoning, and AMI Labs will instead develop what he calls "world models"—systems trained on video and spatial data that can retain memory, reason, and plan complex actions, with potential applications in robotics and transport.
AMI Labs will be led by Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of French health tech start-up Nabla, with LeCun serving as executive chair (LeCun & LeBrun has a nice ring to it). Laurent Solly, Meta's former VP for Europe, is also joining the venture as COO. The company has offices in Paris, New York, Singapore, and Montreal, and about a dozen employees.—
Beatrice Nolan