Renowned artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun confirmed Thursday that he had launched a new startup — the tech world’s worst-kept secret — though he said he would not run the new company as its CEO.
His startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), and he’s hired Alex LeBrun, co-founder and CEO of medical transcription AI startup darling Nabla, as CEO. Nabla revealed LeBrun’s new job at a press release and LeCun confirmed it in a short LinkedIn post.
“Yes, AMI Labs is my new startup. I’m the Executive Chairman. And Alex LeBrun is moving from CEO of Nabla to CEO of AMI Labs!” LeCun he wrote.
AMI Labs is also reportedly looking to raise 500 million euros (about $586 million) at a valuation of 3 billion euros (about $3.5 billion) right out of the gate, before even launching the Financial Times reportedciting people familiar with dealmaking. Given the kind of money VCs are throwing at AI startups founded by world-renowned AI scientists these days, this isn’t even a relatively outrageous question.
For example, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup Thinking Machines Lab was valued at $12 billion in its seed round last year. And Moratti doesn’t have the same street cred as LeCun.
LeCun, a professor at New York University and former vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, won the prestigious AM Turing Awardfor his work in reinforcement learning.
The press release also confirms what everyone also knew: that AMI Labs is working on a global AI model. This is an alternative to LLMs where AI tries to understand its environment (aka the world) so it can simulate cause-effect and what-if scenarios to predict outcomes. Global modelers believe it is the answer to LLMs structural illusion problems. LLMs cannot be trusted to never fabricate information because it is their very nature to be “non-deterministic” — that is, creative.
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Leading labs and startups like Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs are also developing global models. By this comparison, AMI’s fundraising ambitions might seem a little more daring. When World Labs debuted, Li raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation right out of the gate, which was considered a lot at the time. But that was way back in August 2024, or about 100 AI years ago.
In the meantime, Nabla says the company will be looking for a new CEO and will, for now, be run by its co-founder and COO, Delphine Groll, who has yet to hand over the reins permanently. Nabla also says it has signed a partnership to use AMI’s models as they develop.
Nabla 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.
Nabla’s LeBrun could be a good choice for CEO. He’s been building multimodal artificial intelligence since someone called it that, working at Nuance Communications in the early 2010s, which originally powered Apple’s Siri in those old days when Siri was amazing technology. (Microsoft eventually acquired Nuance.) He founded and sold a few natural language startups, including one to Facebook. He then ran Facebook’s AI division before founding Nabla in 2018, according to his LinkedIn.
LeBrun said Nabla, a darling of the Paris-based AI startup community, is still growing well.
“We’ve more than tripled our live ARR this year. Up to $1B!” LeBrun wrote as he announced his departure as CEO. The founder says he will remain at Nabla as president and chief AI scientist. Nabla declined further comment and AMI did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
