Yann LeCun’s AI startup has raised more than $1 billion in seed funding and named a new CEO.
In a post on X on Tuesday, entrepreneur and former Facebook researcher Alex LeBrun said he would join LeCun and the founding team of Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, also known as AMI Labs, as CEO.
“We have secured a US$1.03 billion seed round to further our mission – a long-term scientific endeavor – to build intelligent systems that can truly understand the real world,” LeBlanc said.
AMI Labs said in an X post on Tuesday that the round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, Bezos Expeditions and other investors.
The Paris-based startup added that it is building a team of researchers and engineers in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.
Sainin Hsieh, an AI researcher and professor of computer science at New York University, also said in a post on X on Tuesday that he has joined the founding team. “AMI is not a traditional research institute,” wrote Xie, co-founder and chief scientific officer.
“We’re not going to be like that,” he added.
AMI Labs is hiring engineers, scientists and researchers at four global locations, according to the company’s job listings.
LeCun announced his plans to launch the startup in November after leaving Meta, where he led AI research efforts for 12 years.
AMI Labs focuses on building world models, A type of AI system designed to better understand and reflect how the real world works. LeCun said the startup will be one of the few frontier AI labs that are “not Chinese or American.”
LeCun said at an event in Paris in December that Meta would not invest but would partner with the new venture.
“This new architecture is a project that Mark Zuckerberg really likes. He probably thinks it’s the future,” LeCun said.
In an interview with MIT Technology Review published in January, the AI pioneer said he disagreed with some of Zuckerberg’s decisions, such as closing the robotics team within FAIR.
LeCun also targeted former Scale AI CEO Alexandre Wang, who briefly became his boss following Meta’s AI restructuring.
In an interview with the Financial Times in January, LeCun said: “I don’t have any experience with research, I don’t know how to do research, I don’t know how it’s done, or what’s attractive to researchers and what’s repulsive to researchers.”
“You can’t tell researchers what to do,” LeCun says. “Certainly, we don’t tell researchers like me what to do.”
