By VFutureMedia Tech Desk December 22, 2025
Renowned AI pioneer Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning scientist and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, has officially launched his new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs. The company is dedicated to developing advanced “world models” — sophisticated AI systems designed to simulate and understand the physical world, enabling better reasoning, persistent memory, and planning of complex actions beyond the limitations of current large language models.
LeCun, who departed Meta after over a decade leading its AI efforts, will serve as Executive Chairman of AMI Labs. He has appointed Alex LeBrun, co-founder and former CEO of the healthcare AI company Nabla, as the startup’s CEO. LeBrun, a longtime collaborator of LeCun from their time at Meta’s FAIR lab, will transition fully to AMI Labs while retaining roles at Nabla, including Chairman and Chief AI Scientist.
The launch confirms weeks of speculation following LeCun’s announcement of his Meta exit. AMI Labs aims to push the boundaries of AI toward more autonomous, physically grounded agents capable of applications in robotics, healthcare, transportation, and beyond. World models represent LeCun’s long-held vision for the next revolution in AI, emphasizing learning from video, spatial data, and real-world interactions rather than solely text prediction.
In a strategic move, AMI Labs has forged an exclusive research partnership with Nabla, which will gain priority access to the new world model technologies. This collaboration positions Nabla to integrate these advancements into clinical AI tools, potentially creating safer, more reliable agentic systems for healthcare.
Reports indicate that AMI Labs is in early talks to raise approximately €500 million (around $586 million) at a pre-launch valuation of about €3 billion ($3.5 billion). The funding round, if successful, would underscore the intense investor enthusiasm for AI ventures led by top-tier researchers amid the ongoing boom in the sector.
LeCun has emphasized that AMI Labs will be a global entity with a strong emphasis on European talent, particularly in Paris, where he believes innovation in non-generative AI architectures can flourish away from Silicon Valley’s focus on scaling existing models.
This development highlights the escalating race in AI to achieve human-level intelligence through novel approaches. As LeCun has argued, world models could address key shortcomings like hallucinations in current systems, paving the way for more capable and trustworthy AI agents.
Stay tuned to VFutureMedia for updates on AMI Labs and the evolving landscape of advanced AI research.
Ethan Brooks covers the tech that’s reshaping how we move, work, and think — for VFuture Media. He was at CES 2026 in Las Vegas when the world got its first real look at humanoid robots, AI-powered vehicles, and Samsung’s tri-fold phone. He writes about AI, EVs, gadgets, and green tech every week. No hype. No filler. X · Facebook
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