Yann LeCun, a renowned AI scientist, has confirmed the launch of his new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), which is reportedly seeking a valuation of over $5 billion. LeCun, who is the Executive Chairman of AMI, has hired Alex LeBrun, the former CEO of medical transcription AI startup Nabla, as the CEO of AMI. This move comes as a surprise to many, as LeCun is a well-respected figure in the AI community and has won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for his work on reinforcement learning.
AMI is developing a 'world model' AI, which is an alternative to LLMs. This type of AI aims to understand its environment, or the world, to simulate cause-and-effect relationships and predict outcomes. The goal is to address the structural hallucination problems of LLMs, which can sometimes fabricate information due to their non-deterministic nature.
The startup is seeking to raise €500 million at a valuation of €3 billion, which is a significant amount for a pre-launch AI company. However, given the current market conditions and the success of other AI startups founded by world-recognized AI scientists, this valuation is not considered outrageous. For example, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, was valued at $12 billion for its seed round last year.
The competition in the world model AI space is fierce, with top labs and startups like Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs also developing similar technologies. However, AMI's fundraising aspirations might appear more audacious when compared to the funding raised by World Labs, which debuted with $230 million at a $1 billion valuation in August 2024. Meanwhile, Nabla, the company LeBrun is leaving, has raised a total of $120 million, including a $70 million Series C in June.
LeBrun, who has been building multimodal AI since the early 2010s, is considered a strong choice for the CEO role at AMI. He has a proven track record of success in the AI industry, having founded and sold several natural language startups, including one to Facebook. The founder of AMI, Yann LeCun, will remain on at Nabla as chairman and chief AI scientist, while LeBrun will focus on leading AMI.
