Advanced machine intelligence (AMI), a recent Paris-based startup co-founded by former Meta artificial intelligence chief scientist Yann LeCun, announced on Monday that it has raised more than $1 billion to develop global artificial intelligence models.
LeCun argues that most human reasoning is based in the physical world, not language, and that artificial intelligence world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. “The idea that you are going to expand the possibilities of the LLM [large language models] to the extent that they will have human-level intelligence, it’s complete nonsense,” he stated in an interview with WIRED.
The financing, which values the startup at $3.5 billion, was co-led by investors including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable backers include Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French billionaire telecommunications executive Xavier Niel.
AMI (pronounced like the French word for friend) aims to build “a new breed of artificial intelligence systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe,” the company says in a press release. The startup says it will be global from day one, with offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore and New York, where LeCun, in addition to leading the startup, will continue to work as a professor at New York University. AMI will be LeCun’s first commercial venture since his time trip from Meta in November 2025
LeCun’s startup is competing with many of the world’s largest artificial intelligence labs, such as OpenAI, Anthropic and even his former workplace, Meta, which believe that scaling the LLM will eventually deliver artificial intelligence systems with human-level intelligence or even superintelligence. LLM companies power viral products like ChatGPT and Claude Code, but LeCun is one of the most prominent AI industry researchers speaking out about the limitations of these AI models. LeCun is well known for his candor, but as a pioneer of modern artificial intelligence who won a Turing Award in 2018, his skepticism matters.
LeCun says AMI aims to work with companies in manufacturing, biomedical, robotics and other industries that have large amounts of data. For example, he says, AMI could build a realistic model of an aircraft engine and work with a manufacturer to help it optimize performance, minimize emissions or ensure reliability.
AMI was co-founded by LeCun and several of the leaders he worked with at Meta, including the company’s former chief research officer, Michael Rabbat; former Vice-President of Europe Laurent Solly; and former senior director of artificial intelligence research Pascale Fung. Other co-founders include Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of Nabla, an AI-based healthcare startup, who will be AMI’s CEO, and Saining Xie, a former Google DeepMind researcher, who will be the startup’s chief scientific officer.
The case of world models
LeCun does not dismiss the general usefulness of the LLM. Rather, he said, these AI models are the latest promising trend in the tech industry, and their success has created “a kind of delusion” among the people who create them. “That’s true [LLMs] they’re getting really good at code generation, and it’s true that they’re probably going to become even more useful in the broad area of applications where code generation can be helpful,” LeCun says. “That’s a lot of applications, but it’s not going to lead to human-level intelligence at all.”
LeCun has been working on global models for years at Meta, where he founded the company’s Fundamental AI Research FAIR laboratory. But he now believes his research is best conducted outside the social media giant. He says it became clear to him that the most effective use of the global models would be to sell them to other companies, which didn’t fit Meta’s core consumer business.
As global AI models like Meta’s Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) became more sophisticated, “there was a reorientation of Meta’s strategy where it had to essentially catch up with the industry in LLM and kind of do what other LLM companies were doing, which is not my interest,” LeCun says. “So sometime in November I went to Mark Zuckerberg and told him. He’s always been very supportive of me [world model research]but I told him I could do it faster, cheaper and better outside of Meta. I can share development costs with other companies… His response was, OK, we can cooperate.”