Renowned AI scientist Yann LeCun admitted Thursday that he has launched a new startup, the worst-kept secret in the tech world, but said he has no intention of running the new company as 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. Mr. Nabla revealed Mr. LeBlanc’s new job in a press release, and Mr. LeCun confirmed it in a short 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 aiming to raise 500 million euros (about $586 million) at a valuation of 3 billion euros (about $3.5 billion) before launching, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the deal. That’s not even a relatively outrageous ask, considering the kind of money VCs are putting into AI startups founded by globally recognized AI scientists these days.
For example, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines Lab was valued at $12 billion in a seed round last year. And Murati doesn’t have the street cred that LeCun does.
LeCun, a professor at New York University and previously vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, received the prestigious AM Turing Award for his work on reinforcement learning.
The press release also confirms what everyone knew: AMI Labs is working on world model AI. This is an alternative to LLM where the AI tries to understand its environment (aka the world), allowing it to simulate cause and effect and what-if scenarios to predict outcomes. The creators of the World Model believe this is the answer to LLM’s structural hallucination problem. LLMs cannot be trusted to never fabricate information. This is because the LLM is non-deterministic in nature, meaning it is creative.
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Top labs and startups such as Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs are also developing world models. By comparison, AMI’s fundraising ambitions may seem a little more bold. When World Labs debuted, Lee quickly raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation, which was considered a high amount at the time. But that was a long time ago, in August 2024, or about 100 years before AI.
Meanwhile, Nabla said the company is looking for a new CEO and will be led for the time being by co-founder and chief operating officer Delphine Grohl, who has not yet been given full control. Nabla also said it has entered into a partnership to use AMI’s models during development.
Nabla has raised a total of $120 million from an all-star list of backers, including a $70 million Series C in June. LeCun is one of Nabla’s investors, along with Tony Fadell’s Build Collective, HV Capital, Highland Europe and Cathay Innovation.
Mr. Nabla’s Mr. LeBlanc may be a perfect fit for CEO. He’s been building multimodal AI since before anyone called it multimodal AI, working at Nuance Communications in the early 2010s. Nuance Communications originally powered Apple’s Siri in the distant past, when Siri was a technological marvel. (Microsoft eventually acquired Nuance.) He founded several natural language startups, one of which he sold to Facebook. He went on to run Facebook’s AI division and founded Nabla in 2018, according to LinkedIn.
Leblanc said Nabla, a darling of the Paris-based AI startup community, is still growing steadily.
“Live ARR has more than tripled this year – up to $1 billion!” LeBlanc wrote in announcing his departure as CEO. The founder said he will remain at Nabla as chairman and chief AI scientist. Nabla declined further comment, and AMI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
