Ex-Meta AI chief Yann LeCun's AMI raises $1.03 billion for alternative AI approach
Yann LeCun, Vice President & Chief AI Scientist at Meta attends the 55th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2025. PHOTO: REUTERS
Advanced Machine Intelligence, the startup founded by former Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, said on Tuesday it raised $1.03 billion based on a $3.50 billion pre-money valuation, as it seeks to commercialise artificial intelligence systems built around reasoning, planning and "world models."
The financing positions the company as a test of LeCun's belief that today's large language models fall short of human-level reasoning and autonomy.
Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) is building a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe.
We’ve raised a $1.03B (~€890M) round from global investors who believe in our vision of universally… pic.twitter.com/Yc37J4FqPzThe funding round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.
Meanwhile, Meta (META.O), opens new tab has been intensifying its push into LLM development. In June 2025, the company reorganised its AI efforts under a division called Meta Superintelligence Labs led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
LeCun joined Meta in 2013 to found Facebook AI Research, later known as FAIR, and became one of the company's most prominent AI leaders before departing at the end of 2025.
In an interview with Reuters, LeCun said AMI aims to build systems capable of reasoning and planning in complex real-world settings. He added that current AI approaches based on predicting the next word or pixel will not produce broadly capable intelligent agents by themselves.
The company's near-term target customers are organisations operating complex systems, including manufacturers, automakers, aerospace companies, biomedical firms and pharmaceutical groups. "We want to become the main provider of intelligent systems, regardless of what the application is," LeCun said.
Over time, he added, the technology could also support consumer applications. "What consumers could be interacting with is a domestic robot. You need a domestic robot to have some level of common sense to really understand the physical world."
LeCun said he was also talking with Meta about potentially deploying the technology in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. "That's probably one of the shorter-term potential applications," he said.