Just months after leaving Meta, the company he helped make into an AI powerhouse, Yann LeCun has secured more than a billion dollars to pursue a vision of AI that he believes makes ChatGPT and its peers look fundamentally flawed.

AMI Labs, the new venture co-founded by the Turing Prize winner, has raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. For a company with no product, no revenue and no near-term prospect of either, that is a remarkable statement of investor conviction.

AMI Labs statement on the funding round said,”Generative architectures trained by self-supervised learning to predict the future have been astonishingly successful for language understanding and generation. But much of real-world sensor data is unpredictable, and generative approaches do not work well.

“AMI is developing world models that learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data, ignoring unpredictable details, and that make predictions in representation space. We share one belief: real intelligence does not start in language. It starts in the world.”

LeCun has spent years arguing loudly that the AI industry has taken a wrong turn. He previously warned that AGI is still years away and argued at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 that AI should enhance, not replace, human intelligence.

Large language models, he contends, are statistical pattern-matchers dressed up as intelligence, impressive at generating plausible text but incapable of genuine reasoning, planning or understanding physical reality. His remedy is what researchers call world models: systems that learn how the world actually works rather than simply predicting which word comes next.

LeCun commented on LinkedIn, “We just completed our seed round: $1.03B / 890M€, one the largest seeds ever, probably the largest for a European company. We’re hiring!”

LeCun previously predicted a mass exodus of AI talent from Meta following the release of their latest language model, Llama 4.

A long-haul bet on fundamental research

The company’s CEO is Alexandre LeBrun, who previously built Nabla, a medical AI transcription startup that will serve as AMI Labs’ first development partner. LeBrun commented on LinkedIn, “We have secured a $1.03 billion USD (approximately €890 million) seed round to fuel our mission to build intelligent systems capable of truly understanding the real world—a long-term scientific endeavour.

“Having spent 24 years building AI products, I have witnessed the strengths and, crucially, the limitations of machine learning methodologies.

“While the solutions we’ve shipped have (I hope) had a positive impact and helped people, they all relied on “shortcuts”. Generative architecture trained by self-supervised learning 𝑚𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑐 intelligence; they don’t genuinely understand the world. Predicting tokens, though powerful, works best for discrete and low-dimensional tasks like information retrieval, summarisation, coding, and mathematics.

“However, factories, hospitals, and robots operating in open environments demand AI that grasps reality. And reality is not tokenised: it’s continuous, noisy and high-dimensional. Despite their immense power, I do not believe that generative architectures are the path to achieving this true understanding.

“It is time to move beyond shortcuts and work on a foundational solution. Action-conditioned world models allows agentic systems to predict the consequences of their actions, and to plan action sequences to accomplish a task, subject to safety guardrails.

“AMI will advance AI research and develop applications where reliability, controllability, and safety really matter, especially for industrial process control, automation, wearable devices, robotics, healthcare, and beyond.”

The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, and counts among its individual backers Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Breyer, Mark Cuban and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt – a constellation of names that signals this is being treated as something more than a speculative punt.

The ‘world models’ arms race gathers pace

The startup plans to operate across four locations: Paris, where it is headquartered; New York, where LeCun holds a professorship at NYU; Montreal; and Singapore, chosen both for its AI talent pool and its proximity to prospective clients across Asia.

LeCun himself takes the title of executive chairman, with no intention of running day-to-day operations. He has been characteristically blunt about his motivations for leaving Meta, suggesting that Silicon Valley remains hypnotised by the current generation of generative AI models. The billion-dollar seed round suggests that at least some of the Valley’s most experienced investors think he may be right.

ITW: where AI’s infrastructure future gets debated

AMI Labs news lands at a time when the industry is grappling with AI’s implications at every level of the stack, from network architecture to data centre design. ITW, the world’s largest gathering for the global connectivity and digital infrastructure community, takes place on 19–21 May 2026 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, and the question of what world models and next-generation AI mean for telecoms infrastructure is expected to be one of the defining conversations of the event. To book your place, click here.

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