AMI Labs Secures $1.03 Billion in Seed Funding for World-Model AI Development
AI’s Godfather, Yann LeCun, has launched a bold new venture with his AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs), which just secured $1.03 billion in seed funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. The Turing Award-winning AI pioneer and former chief AI scientist at Meta made the announcement of a massive round, which was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable investors include NVIDIA, Samsung , Sea, Temasek, Toyota Ventures, Bpifrance, and high-profile individuals such as Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, and Xavier Niel. Headquartered in Paris with offices in New York, Montreal, and Singapore, AMI Labs focuses on developing world models – AI systems that learn directly from the physical world rather than relying solely on text data like today’s large language models (LLMs). LeCun has long argued that current LLMs suffer from limitations like hallucinations, which could be dangerous in high-stakes fields such as healthcare. The company’s approach builds on LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), which was introduced in 2022 to create AI capable of reasoning, planning, and understanding reality in a more human-like way. CEO Alexandre LeBrun highlighted the project’s scale and patience required, stating, “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 predicted that “world models” will become the next major buzzword in AI. “My prediction is that ‘world models’ will be the next buzzword. In six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding.” The startup plans to prioritise open-source code releases and community building to accelerate progress. Some of the early partnerships include one with French digital health company Nabla, targeting applications in healthcare where accurate world understanding is critical to avoid errors. The team features prominent researchers, including Saining Xie as chief science officer, Pascale Fung as chief research & innovation officer, and Michael Rabbat as VP of world models. LeBrun serves as CEO, with Laurent Solly (ex- Meta VP for Europe) as COO. This funding dwarfs many recent rounds and exceeds earlier rumours of a €500 million target (roughly $540 million). It joins other world-model-focused efforts, such as Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs (which raised $1 billion recently) and SpAItial’s $13 million seed. AMI Labs’ bet on long-term, fundamental research contrasts with the fast-product, revenue-focused model of many generative AI startups. With heavy backing from industrial players and tech giants, the company aims to tackle compute and talent costs while eventually deploying models in real-world scenarios.
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