Yann LeCun confirms his new startup ‘Global Model’, reportedly seeking a valuation of more than $5 billion

Renowned artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun confirmed on Thursday that he has launched a new startup — the worst-kept secret in the tech world — though he said he would not run the new company as its CEO.

His startup is called Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) and it has hired Alex LeBrun, co-founder and CEO of medical transcription AI startup Nabla, as its CEO. Nabla revealed LeBrun’s new job in a press release, and LeCun confirmed it in a short post on LinkedIn.

“Yes, AMI Labs is my new startup. I am the CEO. Alex LeBrun will move from CEO of Nabla to CEO of AMI Labs!” Written to be.

AMI Labs is also reportedly seeking to raise €500 million (about $586 million) at a valuation of €3 billion (about $3.5 billion) immediately, ahead of its launch, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the dealmaking process. Considering the amount of money venture capital firms are spending on AI startups founded by globally recognized AI scientists these days, this isn’t even a relatively outrageous request.

For example, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, was valued at $12 billion in its seed round last year. And Moratti doesn’t have the same amount of credibility as LeCun.

LeCun, a professor at New York University who was previously vice president and chief AI scientist at Meta, won the prestigious AM Turing Award for his work in reinforcement learning.

The press release also confirms what everyone else knows: that AMI Labs is working on the global model for artificial intelligence. This is an alternative to LLM fields where AI attempts to understand its environment (aka the world) so that it can simulate cause-and-effect and what-if scenarios to predict outcomes. The creators of global models believe that this is the solution to the problems of structural hallucinations experienced by MBA students. LLM students can never be trusted to never make up information, because their nature is to be “non-deterministic” – that is, creative.

Top labs and startups like Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li’s startup, World Labs, are developing global models. By this comparison, AMI’s fundraising aspirations may seem a bit bolder. When World Labs debuted, Lee raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation right off the bat, which was considered a lot of money at the time. But that was August 2024, or about 100 years before AI.

Meanwhile, Nabla says the company will be looking for a new CEO and will for now be run by co-founder and COO, Delphine Grol, who has not yet been handed the reins permanently. Nabla also says it has signed a partnership to use AMI models during its development.

Nabla has raised a total of $120 million from its star roster of backers, including a $70 million Series C in June. LeCun is an investor in Nabla, as are Tony Fadell’s Build Collective, HV Capital, Highland Europe and Cathay Innovation.

Nabla’s LeBrun could be a good choice for CEO. He’s been building multimedia AI since before anyone called it that, working at Nuance Communications in the early 2010s, which originally powered Apple’s Siri in those long, long ago years ago when Siri was wow-tech. (Microsoft eventually acquired Nuance.) He founded and sold two natural language startups, including one to Facebook. He then ran Facebook’s AI division before co-founding Nabila in 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Nabla, a darling of the AI ​​startup community in Paris, is still growing well, Lebrun said.

“We’ve more than tripled our direct ARR this year. Up to $1 billion!” LeBron wrote when he announced his departure as CEO. The founder says he will remain in Naples as chairman of the board and chief artificial intelligence scientist. Nabla declined to comment further, and AMI did not immediately respond to our request for comment.