Yann LeCun Raises $1B to Build AI That Thinks Differently Than ChatGPT

AI pioneer Yann LeCun has raised $1.03 billion in seed funding for his new venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, betting that the industry's dominant approach to artificial intelligence is fundamentally flawed.

The Turing Award-winning researcher, who spent 12 years leading Meta's Fundamental AI Research lab, argues that large language models like ChatGPT will never achieve true general intelligence because they only learn by predicting the next word in a sequence.

AMI Labs is instead building 'world models'-systems that learn from the physical world rather than text. The company is focusing on robotics, healthcare, and industrial applications.

The round includes investments from NVIDIA, Temasek, Samsung, and Toyota Ventures, as well as individual backers Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban. It originally targeted €500 million but was oversubscribed, closing at approximately €890 million with a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion.

The company currently has about 12 employees across hubs in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore. The funding was announced on March 10, 2026.