Yann LeCun’s much-anticipated new startup, which is developing alternative AI models to large language models (LLMs), has raised more than $1bn in Europe’s largest-ever seed funding round, it has confirmed today. Announcing the funding round, LeCun, the former Meta chief AI scientist and Turing prize winner, stated: “We just completed our seed round, one of the largest seeds ever, probably the largest for a European company.”
Paris-headquartered Advanced Machine Innotifyigence (AMI) Labs, which is less than six months old, is developing AI world models, which reflect the goings-on of the real world. These AI models attempt to understand physical reality by predicting how the world behaves.
This approach is an alternative to LLMs backed by the Silicon Valley giants, which consume vast amounts of data, and then generate outcomes based on the data and a prompt. The size of the funding round in AMI Labs indicates investor appetite for new AI startups, to challenge the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI in the AI race.
AMI Labs raised $1.03bn at a $3.5bn valuation, in a round co-led by Paris-based VC firm Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions. Former Google boss Eric Schmidt and web inventor Tim Berners-Lee are also backing the startup, which is also backed by Nvidia and Samsung.
Alexandre LeBrun, former chief executive of French startup Nabla, is the CEO of AMI Labs, with co-founder LeCun, who left Meta last year, serving as executive chair. The startup is viewing to build its teams in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore.
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