Ex Meta AI Leader Raises $1 Billion to Build the System That He Says Can Do What LLMs Can’t

Yann LeCun founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in January 2026.

BY AVA LEVINSON, NEWS WRITER

Yann LeCun, founder of AMI Labs. (Photo by Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun just raised over $1 billion for his new startup Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, or AMI Labs. He was driven by his belief that the top AI companies’ similar approaches to building AI systems would eventually face limitations. 

LeCun has said that the issue with large language models (LLMs), including the models that run behind chatbots like ChatGPT, “is that they do not plan ahead. Trained solely on digital data, they do not have a way of understanding the complexities of the real world,” as reported by The New York Times. 

He wants to change that.

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At two months old and with 12 employees, the company’s seed funding round brings it to a $3.5 billion valuation. Contributors include investors in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban. 

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With its modern approach, AMI Labs intends to explore new ideas, operating more like a research lab, according to cofounder and CEO Alex LeBrun. He added that the company plans to apply its technology to products like health care tools and robots.

“If you try to take robots into open environments—into households or into the street—they will not be useful with current technology,” LeBrun told the NYT. “We want to help them reach to new situations with more common sense.”

LeCun confirmed to Reuters that his goal is to build systems that are able to reason in real-world settings.

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