Yann LeCun just raised $1bn to prove the AI industry has got it wrong

The Turing Award winner left Meta four months ago convinced that large language models are a dead end. Today he announced $1.03 billion in seed funding, Europe’s largest ever, to build something different.

In November 2025, Yann LeCun walked into Mark Zuckerberg’s office and told his boss he was leaving. He had spent twelve years building Meta’s AI research operation into one of the most respected in the world, and had become one of the industry’s most vocal critics of the technology dominating it.

Large language models, he argued, were a statistical illusion. Impressive, yes. Intelligent, no. He thought he could build something better, and he thought he could do it faster outside Meta than inside it. On Tuesday, investors put $1.03 billion behind that conviction.

Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, AMI, pronounced like the French word for “friend”, announced its ...