Turing Award Winner LeCun's AI Startup AMI Secures Billion-Dollar Funding After Leaving Meta

Turing Award winner Yann LeCun founded the AI startup AMI four months after leaving Meta, which completed a $1.03 billion seed funding round, setting a record for the largest seed round in European history. This move signifies that LeCun’s long-standing criticism of large language models (LLMs) will turn into action. He and his team will focus on developing a World Model that surpasses LLMs and challenges existing technological barriers.

Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Secures $1 Billion Investment

On March 10, 2026, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) announced the completion of its funding round, with a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion. Although AMI currently has no products or revenue, international investors including Bezos Expeditions, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Singapore’s Temasek contributed well beyond the original €500 million seed target. AMI’s high valuation reflects market concerns over current generative technology bottlenecks and trust in LeCun’s academic reputation. The AMI leadership team includes industry experts such as former Meta Research Science Director Michael Rabbat and former Google DeepMind member Saining Xie, forming a strong lineup.

What Is AMI Building?

In short, it’s a World Model—an artificial intelligence system that LeCun has been advocating for years. To understand this more deeply, it’s important to grasp why he believes AI has gone in the wrong direction.

LeCun’s Criticism of LLMs Before Leaving Meta: Statistical Fallacies

LeCun’s motivation for leaving Meta was his belief that large language models are merely “statistical illusions” based on probability distributions. LLMs learn by predicting the next word in a sequence, performing well in generating fluent text but lacking understanding of the physical world. LeCun points out that this word-by-word or pixel-by-pixel prediction approach easily leads to “hallucinations” and cannot learn through observation and experience like humans or animals. He argues that the current development path has fundamental limitations; relying solely on massive text training makes it difficult to achieve high-level intelligence with reasoning and physical commonsense.

Core Technology of AMI: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture as an Alternative Path

The core of AMI’s technology is the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), proposed by LeCun in 2022. Unlike generative AI that predicts all text, JEPA aims to learn abstract representations of how the world works, ignoring unpredictable surface noise, and strives to build a system capable of understanding physical reality rather than just processing language symbols. According to plans, AMI intends to collaborate with enterprise partners within the next one to two years, aiming to develop general intelligence systems deployable across various fields within three to five years, with the goal of becoming a leading provider of intelligent technology.

LeCun: AMI Headquarters in Europe to Counter US-China AI Monopoly

AMI will be headquartered in Paris, Europe, with offices in New York and Montreal, demonstrating LeCun’s ambition to challenge the AI dominance of the US and China. He emphasizes AMI’s uniqueness as a cutting-edge laboratory outside the US and China. However, this ambitious plan faces significant time pressures, as the new model is a long-term scientific research project unlikely to generate profits in the short term. While the $1.03 billion provides ample funding for initial R&D, whether the JEPA architecture can effectively address LLM shortcomings and be transformed into competitive commercial AI remains a long road ahead.

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