In November, Yan left to be dead after 12 years due to disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg over the future of artificial intelligence. Frustrated by the limitations of large language models (LLMs), the French computer scientist founded AMI Labs, a Paris-based startup focused on developing “universal models.” The startup announced today (March 10) that it has raised $1 billion in its largest ever funding round in Europe.
The financing values AMI at $3.5 billion up front, and includes a group 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 CEO, directing AMI’s long-term goal of building artificial intelligence systems capable of understanding complex real-world data.
LeCun appointed Alex LeBrun, his former colleague at Meta, as CEO of AMI. LeBron previously worked on Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) team, which LeCun led for more than a decade. He also co-founded Nabla, a startup that designs artificial intelligence tools for doctors.
In a Share LinkedIn Today, Lebrun explains that “universal models”, unlike today’s masters, can predict the consequences of actions and plan sequences for completing tasks. “AMI will advance artificial intelligence research He wrote, citing fields such as automation, robotics, healthcare and wearables, developing applications where reliability, controllability and safety are of great importance.
LeCun, who moved from France to the United States in the 1980s to work at AT&T Bell Laboratories, has become a seminal figure in the field of machine learning. He received the 2018 Turing Award for his pioneering work in neural networks.
His departure from Meta last November came after his public criticism of LLMs as “…impasse“To achieve truly intelligent systems. The move coincided with Meta’s internal restructuring around Alexander Wang, the 29-year-old founder and former CEO of Scale AI, who now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). LeCun criticized Wang’s leadership, calling him “InexperiencedDespite their split, LeCun said AMI could one day collaborate with Meta on projects like 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 Rabat will serve as AMI’s Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Global Models, respectively. Pascal Fung, a professor of engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is the startup’s chief research and innovation officer.
The company is also hiring across its offices in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.
According to PitchBook, AMI’s $1 billion raising is Europe’s largest seed round to date and represents another milestone in the rapidly evolving global modeling sector. Other major players include Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, which raised $1 billion last month, and General Intuition, which raised $134 million in October.
Global models, or artificial intelligence systems trained to simulate and reason about physical environments rather than simply generate text, are attracting increasing interest from researchers skeptical of LLM students’ ability to understand reality. AMI plans to focus first on developing global prototyping research before pursuing commercial applications, with early use cases likely in factories and hospitals.
Nabla will be one of AMI’s first external partners, where Lebrun will remain president and chief AI scientist. The partnership will give Nabla early access to AMI research, testing how global model-based AI performs in a fast-paced, high-stakes clinical care environment.
