Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world

Justifiable.

There are a lot more degrees of freedom in world models.

LLMs are fundamentally capped because they only learn from static text -- human communications about the world -- rather than from the world itself, which is why they can remix existing ideas but find it all but impossible to produce genuinely novel discoveries or inventions. A well-funded and well-run startup building physical world models (grounded in spatiotemporal understanding, not just language patterns) would be attacking what I see as the actual bottleneck to AGI. Even if they succeed only partially, they may unlock the kind of generalization and creative spark that current LLMs structurally can't reach.

> But this is not an applied AI company.

There is absolutely no doubt about Yann's impact on AI/ML, but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything.

It could be a management issue, though, and I sincerely wish we will see more competition, but from what I quoted above, it does not seem like it.

Understanding world through videos (mentioned in the article), is just what video models have already done, and they are getting pretty good (see Seedance, Kling, Sora .. etc). So I'm not quite sure how what he proposed would work.

Yann LeCun seeks $5B+ valuation for world model startup AMI (Amilabs).

He has hired LeBrun to the helm as CEO.

AMI has also hired LeFunde as CFO and LeTune as head of post-training.

They’re also considering hiring LeMune as Head of Growth and LePrune to lead inference efficiency.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-confirms-his-ne...

This couldn't have happened sooner, for 2 reasons.

1) the world has become a bit too focused on LLMs (although I agree that the benefits & new horizons that LLMs bring are real). We need research on other types of models to continue.

2) I almost wrote "Europe needs some aces". Although I'm European, my attitude is not at all that one of competition. This is not a card game. What Europe DOES need is an ATTRACTIVE WORKPLACE, so that talent that is useful for AI can also find a place to work here, not only overseas!

Regardless of your opinion of Yann or his views on auto regressive models being "sufficient" for what most would describe as AGI or ASI, this is probably a good thing for Europe. We need more well capitalized labs that aren't US or China centric and while I do like Mistral, they just haven't been keeping up on the frontier of model performance and seem like they've sort of pivoted into being integration specialists and consultants for EU corporations. That's fine and they've got to make money, but fully ceding the research front is not a good way to keep the EU competitive.

I feel like I'm the only one not getting the world models hype. We've been talking about them for decades now, and all of it is still theoretical. Meanwhile LLMs and text foundation models showed up, proved to be insanely effective, took over the industry, and people are still going "nah LLMs aren't it, world models will be the gold standard, just wait."

Seems like it's the second largest seed round anywhere after Thinking Machines Labs? https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-seed-round-ai-th...

That article is from June 2025 so may be out of date, and the definition of "seed round" is a bit fuzzy.

I attended a talk from Yann LeCun, and he always had a strong opinion about auto-regressive models. Its nice to see someone not just chasing hype and doing more research.

At least some of that money should definitely go towards improving his powerpoint slides on JEPA related work :)

Archive: https://archive.md/5eZWq

The startup is Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs: https://amilabs.xyz/

As someone in the tech twitter sphere this is yann and his ideas performing a suplex on LLM based companies. It is completely unfathomable to start an ai research company… Only sell off 20% and have 1 billion for screwing around for a few years.

Why world model? To emulate how we became sentient?

A "world" is just senses. In a way the context is one sense. A digital only world is still a world.

I think more success is in a model having high level needs and aspirations that are borne from lower level needs. Model architecture also needs to shift to multiple autonomous systems that interact, in the same ways our brains work - there's a lot under the surface inside our heads, it's not just "us" in there.

We only interact with our environment because of our low level needs, which are primarily: food, water. Secondary: mating. Tertiary: social/tribal credit (which can enable food, water and mating).

Wasn't there some recent argument that world models won't achieve AGI either due to overlooking the normative framework, fundamental symmetries of the world purely from data and collapse in multi-step reasoning? JEPA is sacrificing fidelity for abstract representation yet how does that help in the real world where fidelity is the most important point? It's like relying on differential equations yet soon finding out they only cover minuscule amount of real world problems and almost all interesting problems are unsolvable by them.

That being sad, Yann LeCun's twitter reposts are below average IQ.

A fair amount of negative comments here, but Yann might very well be the person who brings the Bell Labs culture back to life. It’s been badly missing, and not just in Europe.

I wish him luck.

Recently all papers are about LLM, it brings up fatigue.

As GPT is almost reaching its limit, new architecture could bring out new discovery.

This feels like more justified investment as it’s try to move the needle. Hope he succeeds

That's between 1 and 10 training runs on a large foundational model, depending on pricing discounts and how much they manage to optimize it. I priced this out last night on AWS, which is admittedly expensive, but models have also gotten larger.

I have no faith in anyone doing AI to accomplish anything (especially relative to how much money they spend) except John Carmack. People should be trying to throw money at him

Europe becoming really attractive right now!

What use is it to understand the physical world if all investments are misallocated to the virtual world? Perhaps the AI will detect that there is a housing shortage and politicians will finally believe it because AI said so?

Or is it to accelerate Skynet?

He couldn't achieve at least parity with LLMs during his days at Meta (and having at his disposal billions in resources most probably) but he'll succeed now? What is the pitch?

Does anyone have a sense of how funding like this is typically allocated? how much tends to go toward compute/training versus researchers, infrastructure, and general operations?

impressive that the round was 100% oversubscribed but to be expected when it's the prof that trained a good chunk of the current AI founders.

Meta's greatest loss of the decade

There's been a few very interesting JEPA publications from LeCun recently, particularly the leJEPA paper which claims to simplify a lot of training headaches for that class of models.

JEPAs also strike me as being a bit more akin to human intelligence, where for example, most children are very capable of locomotion and making basic drawings, but unable to make pixel level reconstructions of mental images (!!).

One thing I want to point out is that very LeCunn type techniques demonstrating label free training such as JEAs like DINO and JEPAs have been converging on performance of models that require large amounts of labeled data.

Alexandr Wang is a billionaire who made his wealth through a data labeling company and basically kicked LeCunn out.

Overall this will be good for AI and good for open source.

I raised $1 to understand your physical world.

Alternative free to read article: https://sifted.eu/articles/yann-lecun-ami-labs-meta-funding-...

It’s 4.7B actually, he confirmed it here https://x.com/ylecun/status/2031331124450931058?s=46

More research on more models = more betta

Yann LeCun said a number of things that are very dubious, like autoregressive LLMs are a dead end, LLMs do not have an internal world model, and this morning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFi1TPiB058 (in french) that an IA cannot find a strategy to preserve itself against the will of its creator.

As a french, I wish him good luck anyway, I'm all for exploring different avenues of achieving AGI.

Looks like they'll be hiring on in Montreal in addition to Paris (and NYC and Signapore): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ami

I hope they grow that office like crazy. This would be really good for Canada. We have (or have had) the AI talent here (though maybe less so overall in Montreal than in Toronto/Waterloo and Vancouver and Edmonton).

And I hope Carney is promoting the crap out of this and making it worth their while to build that office out.

I don't really do Python or large scale learning etc, so don't see a path for myself to apply there but I hope this sparks some employment growth here in Canada. Smart choice to go with bilingual Montreal.

I just saw a post from Yann mentioning that AMI Labs is hiring too!

WE HAVE RAISED A BILLION DOLLORS

but you don’t even have a product

/cape

If he's right (that LLMs cannot achieve AGI, but what he's working on can, and does), this would be huge for AI and humanity at large.

Hope it puts to bed the "Europe can't innovate" crowd too.

If, for even 1s, they get in a position which is threatening, in any way, Big Tech AI (mostly US based if not all), they will be raided by international finance to be dismantled and poached hardcore with some massive US "investment funds" (which looks more and more as "weaponized" international finance!!). Only china is very immune to international finance. Those funds have tens of thousands of billions of $, basically, in a world of money, there is near zero resistance.

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Once again, US companies and VCs are in this seed round. Just like Mistral with their seed round.

Europe again missing out, until AMI reaches a much higher valuation with an obvious use case in robotics.

Either AMI reaches over $100B+ valuation (likely) or it becomes a Thinking Machines Lab with investors questioning its valuation. (very unlikely since world models has a use-case in vision and robotics)

This could have been 1000 seed rounds. We are creating technological deserts by going all-in on AI and star personalities.

Not based on true valuation unless h-index has become a valuation metric lol

Academics don’t always make great entrepeneurs

Here you can see why it is so hard to compete as European startup with US startups - abysmal access to money. Investment of 1B USD in Europe is glorified as largest seed ever, but in USA it is another Tuesday.

Adds up : We are seeing a clear exodus of both capital and talent from the US - with the current US administration’s shift toward cronyism - and the EU stands as the most compelling alternative with a uniform market of 500 million people and the last major federation truly committed to the rule of law.

AI is developing backwards. The simplest organisms eat and find food. More complex ones can smell and sense tremors. After several steps in evolution comes vision and complex thought.

AIs that can't smell, can't feel hunger, can't desire -- I do not think it can understand the world the way organic life does.