AI Pioneer Yann LeCun Launches AMI, Raises More Than $1 Billion to Tackle AI Hallucinations

Yann LeCun, a pioneer of convolutional neural networks and a winner of the 2018 Turing Award, served as Meta's chief AI scientist for more than 12 years before leaving in late 2025 to found Advanced Machine Intelligence, or AMI. He argues that large language models cannot truly understand the physical world and is instead betting on world models, an architecture he hopes can reduce generative AI hallucinations and expand robotics applications.

Paris-based AMI announced a $1.03 billion seed round, equivalent to about €890 million, on March 10, 2026, at a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion. Investors included Nvidia, Samsung, a Toyota-affiliated fund, Temasek and Sea. Alexandre LeBrun was appointed chief executive and LeCun chairman. The funding will support the development of world models capable of reasoning, planning and persistent memory.