Renowned AI scientist Yann LeCun confirmed on Thursday that he has launched a new startup, a move that was considered the worst-kept secret in the tech world. He clarified that he will not be running the new company as its CEO. His startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI Labs, and has hired Alex LeBrun as its CEO. LeBrun is the co-founder and outgoing CEO of the medical transcription AI startup Nabla.
Nabla disclosed LeBrun’s new role in a press release, and LeCun confirmed it in a brief post on LinkedIn, stating he will serve as Executive Chairman of AMI Labs. Reports indicate that AMI Labs is seeking to raise €500 million at a €3 billion valuation right from the start, even before launching. In today’s market, where venture capitalists are heavily investing in AI startups founded by renowned scientists, such a fundraising goal is not considered outrageous.
For comparison, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, was valued at $12 billion in its seed round last year. LeCun, a professor at New York University and former VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, is a Turing Award winner for his work on reinforcement learning.
The press release confirms that AMI Labs is working on world model AI. This is an alternative to large language models where the AI attempts to understand its environment to simulate cause-and-effect scenarios and predict outcomes. Proponents believe world models could solve the structural hallucination problems inherent in LLMs, which are non-deterministic by nature.
Other top labs and startups are also developing world models, including Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. When World Labs debuted, it raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation, which was considered substantial at the time.
Meanwhile, Nabla will be searching for a new CEO and will be run on an interim basis by its co-founder and COO, Delphine Groll. Nabla also announced a partnership to use AMI’s models as they are developed. Nabla has raised $120 million in total from a list of prominent backers, including LeCun himself.
Alex LeBrun brings considerable experience to his new role at AMI. He has been working in multimodal AI since the early 2010s at Nuance Communications, the original technology behind Apple’s Siri. He later founded and sold natural language startups and ran Facebook’s AI division before founding Nabla in 2018.
In announcing his departure from Nabla, LeBrun noted the company is performing well, having more than tripled its live annual recurring revenue this year. He will remain at Nabla as chairman and chief AI scientist.