Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is in talks with investors to raise €500m at a valuation of about €3bn for a new startup he is launching early next year, according to the Financial Times.
One source with direct knowledge confirmed the numbers to Sifted. The discussions are still in early stages and could change, says the report. LeCun declined to comment.
Founder of Paris-based AI startup Nabla Alexandre Lebrun is also set to join the new project, dubbed Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, as CEO. Before launching Nabla, which provides a medical AI assistant, Lebrun was a research engineer at Meta’s AI lab in Paris, FAIR (Facebook AI Research), where he worked closely with LeCun.
In a statement released on Thursday Nabla said: “As part of a planned, board-supported transition, Nabla co-founder and CEO Alex Lebrun will transition from his role to become CEO of AMI Labs.”
Lebrun will remain chair and chief AI scientist at Nabla and cofounder and COO Delphine Groll will lead the company while a permanent CEO is sought for the startup.
Nabla also said it has inked a “strategic research partnership” with AMI Labs.
AMI Labs
Last month LeCun, a Turing award winner and one of the most influential figures in AI, announced he will be leaving Meta at the end of the year to create his own startup.
The new company will focus on “world models”, systems that can understand the physical world instead of merely generating text like today’s large-language models (LLMs).
Speaking at an event in Paris earlier this month LeCun said world models, which learn from text and video but also spatial data like actions, could open up “a world of applications” in fields like robotics.
In the statement Nabla said it will gain "first access" to AMI's world model technologies, enabling the company to "become the first to bring FDA-certifiable agentic AI systems to healthcare."
AMI Labs will be a global entity with research organisations around the world and particularly in Europe, said LeCun at the time. “Silicon Valley is completely hypnotised by generative models, and so you have to do this kind of work outside of Silicon Valley, in Paris,” he said.
LeCun has been a long-time advocate for European AI talent and startups, convincing Meta to open FAIR in Paris in 2015.
Update: This article was amended on 18 December to add information from the statement released by Nabla.
