Yann LeCun confirms his new ‘world model’ startup, reportedly seeks $5B+ valuation

Renowned AI scientist Yann LeCun confirmed this on Thursday he had launched a new startup – the worst-kept secret in the tech world – although he said he will not lead the new company as CEO.

His startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) and has Alex LeBrun, co-founder and CEO of medical transcription AI startup dear Nablaas CEO. Nabla announced LeBrun’s new job in a press release and LeCun confirmed it in a short post on LinkedIn.

“Yes, AMI Labs is my new startup. I am the Executive Chairman. And Alex LeBrun is transitioning from CEO of Nabla to CEO of AMI Labs!” LeCun wrote.

AMI Labs is also reportedly looking to raise €500 million (about $586 million) at a €3 billion (about $3.5 billion) valuation right out of the gate, before it even launches. The Financial Times reports thisreferring to people who are familiar with deal making. Considering the kind of money VCs are throwing at AI startups founded by world-renowned AI scientists these days, that’s not even a relatively excessive ask.

Consider, for example, the startup of former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Thinking Machines Lab, was valued at $12 billion for its seed round last year. And Murati doesn’t have the same kind of reputation as LeCun.

LeCun, a professor at New York University who was previously VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, won the prestigious AM Turing Awardfor his work in reinforcement learning.

The press release also confirms what everyone already knew: that AMI Labs is working on world model AI. This is an alternative to LLMs where the AI ​​attempts to understand its environment (aka the world) so it can simulate cause-and-effect and what-if scenarios to predict outcomes. World model creators believe this is the answer to the structural hallucination problems of LLMs. You can’t rely on LLMs to never make up information because their nature is to be ‘non-deterministic’, i.e. creative.

Top labs and startups like it Google Deepmind and Fei-Fei Li’s startup, World laboratoriesalso develop world models. That comparison may make AMI’s fundraising ambitions seem a bit bolder. When World Labs debuted, Li raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation right out of the gate, which was considered a lot at the time. But that was a long time ago, in August 2024, or about 100 AI years ago.

Meanwhile, Nabla says the company will look for a new CEO and will be led for now by co-founder and COO, Delphine Groll, who has not yet finally taken the reins. Nabla also says it has signed a partnership to use AMI’s models as they are developed.

Nabla has raised a total of $120 million from an all-star list of backers. including a $70 million Series C in June. LeCun is one of Nabla’s investors, as are Tony Fadell’s Build Collective, HV Capital, Highland Europe and Cathay Innovation.

Nabla’s LeBrun could be a good choice for CEO. He’s been building multimodal AI since before anyone called it that. He worked in the early 2010s at Nuance Communications, which originally powered Apple’s Siri in those years ago when Siri was still a wow technology. (Microsoft eventually acquired Nuance.) He founded and sold a number of natural language startups, including one to Facebook. He then led Facebook’s AI division before founding Nabla in 2018, according to his LinkedIn.

LeBrun said that Nabla, a darling of the Paris-based AI Startup Communitystill growing well.

“We more than tripled our live ARR this year. To almost $1 billion!” LeBrun wrote as he announced his departure as CEO. The founder says he will remain at Nabla as chairman and chief AI scientist. Nabla declined further comment and AMI did not immediately respond to our request for comment.