Who's behind AMI Labs, Yann LeCun's ‘world model’ startup

Yann LeCun's new venture, AMI Labs, has drawn intense attention since the AI scientist left Meta to found it.

TL;DR

AMI Labs, founded by AI scientist Yann LeCun, is developing 'world models' to create intelligent systems that understand the real world.
The startup aims to create AI systems with persistent memory, reasoning, planning abilities, and safety, contrasting with LLMs.
AMI Labs will target high-stakes applied fields like industrial process control, automation, wearable devices, robotics, and healthcare.
The company plans to license its technology and contribute to the AI research community through open publications and open source.
AMI Labs will be headquartered in Paris, with additional offices in Montreal, New York, and Singapore.

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Yann LeCun reposted

Captain Insight

Neural networks were declared scientifically dead in 1987.

A French PhD student bet his entire career on them anyway ~ and won. 🤯

>Meet Yann LeCun 🇫🇷

>Paris-born. PhD from Sorbonne in 1987.

>Joined Bell Labs in 1988. Kept building. Alone.

>In 1989, built Convolutional Neural Networks

>By the late 90s, his CNN was reading 10% of US bank checks

>The industry called it a niche trick. Ignored him for over a decade.

>Then 2012 hit. Deep learning exploded.

>His “dead” research became the blueprint for everything

> ChatGPT. Gemini. Claude. Grok. All standing on his shoulders. 🚀

>Won the 2018 Turing Award ~ computing’s Nobel Prize

>Became Chief AI Scientist at Meta “Godfather of AI.”

>Now publicly says LLMs are a dead end.

>Fights the entire industry.

>Left Meta in late 2025 to build AMI Labs in Paris

>Already valued at $3.5B before launching. World models, not LLMs.

The industry ignored him for over 20 years.

Now he’s ignoring the industry.

Absolute Legend 🐐

Yann LeCun reposted

Aakash Gupta

Yann LeCun closed $1.03B for AMI Labs on March 10. Three days later, this paper dropped from his NYU collaborators.

15M parameters. Single GPU. A few hours of training.

LeWorldModel is the first JEPA that trains end-to-end from raw pixels. Two loss terms: predict the next embedding, keep the latent space Gaussian. Previous JEPAs needed exponential moving averages or pretrained encoders to avoid representation collapse. LeWM doesn't.

Six hyperparameters down to one.

The numbers are the story. Foundation-model-based world models require hundreds of millions of parameters and serious compute to plan a control task. LeWM plans up to 48x faster while staying competitive on 2D and 3D benchmarks. The whole thing fits on a laptop GPU.

Look at the trajectory. Yann announced his Meta departure in November 2025 after 12 years and called founding FAIR his "proudest non-technical accomplishment." On March 10, 2026, AMI Labs closed the largest seed round in European history at a $3.5B pre-money valuation. Bezos, Nvidia, Samsung, and Toyota all wrote checks.

Three days later: a paper showing that JEPA-from-pixels is no longer fragile and no longer compute-heavy. The engineering scaffolding that made it look like an academic curiosity is gone.

The authors sit at Mila, NYU, Samsung SAIL, and Brown. None at Meta.

Yann's bet was that the path to machine intelligence runs through world models, not language models. He left a public company to build it. Each JEPA paper from his network resets the assumed cost structure for that bet. This one makes world modeling laptop-cheap.

Meta still has the GPUs. The architecture left.

Yann LeCun reposted

Haider.

Yann LeCun says you cannot build a reliable agentic system without a world model

LLMs don't have world models. They can't predict the consequences of their actions before taking them

"they just act, and whatever happens next is someone else's problem"

Without that, it's not intelligence

Yann LeCun

Fun interview with Jacob Effron on the Unsupervised Learning podcast.

Yann LeCun reposted

Haider.

Yann LeCun says that within a year to 18 months, we'll have a general method for training hierarchical world models

These models would learn from video and real-world data, then help plan actions in robotics, healthcare, and other areas

"then scale them toward a universal world model"

Yann LeCun reposted

Kosta Derpanis (sabbatical in Zurich)

.@ylecun’s definition of what is a world model. https://t.co/lZRXwMrYOK

Yann LeCun

Reminder.

Yann LeCun reposted

Chris Offner

Here is @ylecun ‘s recent lecture on world models at @ETH: https://t.co/TmSMz9FMzI

Yann LeCun reposted

France TV Pro

#Invité

@ylecun, ancien responsable de recherche IA au sein de Meta et fondateur de la startup AMI, sera ce soir l’invité

@le20hfrancetele

Il répondra aux questions de @LeaSalame à l'occasion de l'ouverture aujourd'hui de VivaTech

▶️#France2 & https://t.co/JqV7mXAoWY https://t.co/gs5Ud9UxpU

Yann LeCun reposted

Julia Kempe

I am excited to share that I am joining @amilabs as Director of Research, Paris, working with @ylecun and an exceptional founding team.

Further progress in machine intelligence will require not only scaling foundation models and large-scale engineering, but also new ideas and breakthroughs.

This is what makes AmiLabs such a unique and exciting place to build. Its focus on world modeling — systems that can learn richer representations of the real world, reason, plan, and learn from interaction — is a long-term research direction I am deeply excited about.

I am particularly looking forward to working with extraordinary co-founders @sainingxie, @lxbrun, @michaelrabbat, @pascalefung, @mavenlin, @laurentsolly, and the amazingly talented AmiLabs team, to helping build the research organization and to the journey ahead.

Yann LeCun reposted

Florian Brunner

Yann Le Cun porte un constat juste : les IA génératives, comme ChatGPT, Claude ou Gemini et autres, sont extrêmement habiles pour manier les langages, mais elles ne sont pas connectées directement à la réalité physique. Les IA génératives n’ont accès que partiellement à une dimension essentielle de notre univers.

Le projet de Yann Le Cun, de créer des world models, avec sa nouvelle start-up, se révèle particulièrement intelligent. Ces modèles inédits seraient en capacité de cerner et modéliser la réalité de notre monde, avec davantage de précision et de discernement. Il en résulterait une meilleure faculté de traiter l’information et surtout une lecture immédiate des dynamiques entropiques, qui façonnent et structurent notre réalité.

Pour une fois, nous pouvons engager une révolution technologique. L’Europe peut s’imposer dans le domaine prometteur des world models. Le succès sera au rendez-vous si l’Union européenne se montre enfin capable de mobiliser de puissants investissements.

Yann LeCun reposted

Bloomberg

Yann LeCun joins new investing firm 224 Ventures to invest in AI startups https://t.co/IGK7iyzYJ8