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

Renowned AI scientist Yann LeCun confirmed on Thursday that he had launched a new startup — the worst-kept secret in the tech world — though he said he will not be running the new company as its CEO.

His startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) and has hired Alex LeBrun, co-founder and CEO of medical transcription AI startup darling Nabla, as its CEO. Nabla disclosed LeBrun’s new job in a press release and LeCun confirmed it in a brief post on LinkedIn.

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

AMI Labs is also reportedly seeking to raise €500 million (about $586 million) at a €3 billion valuation (about $3.5 billion) right out of the gate, before even launching, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the dealmaking. Given the kind of money that VCs are throwing at AI startups founded by world-recognized AI scientists these days, that’s not even an comparatively outrageous ask.

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

LeCun, a professor at New York University who was formerly VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, for his work on reinforcement learning.

The press release also confirms what everyone knew as well: 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 it’s the answer to LLMs’ structural hallucination problems. LLMs can’t be trusted to never fabricate info because it is their very nature to be “non-deterministic” — that is, creative.

Top labs and startups like Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li’s startup, World Labs, are also developing world models. By that comparison, the fundraising aspirations of AMI might appear a bit more audacious. 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 way back in August 2024, or about 100 AI years ago.

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

Nabla has raised $120 million in total from an all-star list of backers, including a $70 million Series C in June. LeCun is one of Nabla’s investors, as is 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, working at Nuance Communications in the early 2010s, which originally powered Apple’s Siri in those long-ago years when Siri was wow technology. (Microsoft eventually acquired Nuance.) He founded and sold a couple of natural language startups, including one to Facebook. Then he ran 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 community, is still growing well.

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