Meta Platforms’ (META) chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is looking to raise €500M for his new startup that will focus on “world models,” the Financial Times reported.
The €500M capital raise would value the company — which will be known as Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs — at about €3B, the news outlet added, citing people familiar with the matter. LeCun has also tapped Alexandre LeBrun to be AMI’s CEO, the news outlet reported, citing sources. LeBrun is the founder of French health tech start-up Nabla.
“As part of a planned, board-supported transition, Nabla co-founder and CEO Alex LeBrun will transition from his role to become CEO of AMI Labs,” Nabla co-founder Delphine Groll told the news outlet.
LeCun did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
LeCun, who is leaving Meta Platforms to start the new company, said earlier this month that the tech giant will not invest in his startup and seemed to express displeasure for Silicon Valley’s focus on language models. “Our best AI systems can pass the bar exam, write code,” LeCun said at the AI-Pulse event in Paris. “But we still don’t have a robot that can do what a five-year-old can. We are missing something big.”
He also suggested that the company may be based outside of Silicon Valley.
In a public post on LinkedIn announcing his departure, LeCun, who is sometimes referred to as “the godfather of AI” and is the founding director of the FAIR lab, said his new company will go beyond what’s been done already. Nonetheless, Meta will partner with the startup and give it access to its innovations, LeCun added.
“The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences,” LeCun wrote.