Meta’s former AI chief raised $1 billion to prove chatbots wrong

With AMI, Yann LeCun is trying to prove that Silicon Valley’s chatbot boom may be backing the wrong kind of artificial intelligence after all

Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Yann LeCun has spent years arguing that Silicon Valley’s favorite AI products are, intellectually speaking, really just very impressive party tricks. Now, the former Meta $META AI chief has raised $1.03 billion for a startup called AMI to prove that the road to something like real machine intelligence doesn’t run through ever-larger chatbots (with ever-bigger spending), but through “world models” that can understand how reality works.

$1 billion is a giant sum for a company founded four months ago, with no product and no interest in pretending one is around the corner. But while much of the AI industry has spent the past few years treating LLMs as the obvious route to bigger and better “intelligence,” LeCun has been one of the field’s loudest dissenters. 

In an interview with WIRED, the Turing Award winner called the idea that LLMs will simply scale their way to human-level intelligence “complete nonsense.” AMI, short for Advanced Machine Intelligence, is his chance to stop being the guy yelling from the wings of the stage and become the guy building his own spotlight.

LeCun left Meta in late 2025 after spending 12 years building Meta’s AI research operation; he remains one of the most prominent voices inside Big Tech arguing that the industry is getting a little drunk on autocomplete. 

Essentially, the former AI chief seems to think that........

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