Yann LeCun has confirmed his new quote.
Unquote world model startup is looking for a 5 billion valuation as he is launching his own AI company.
He was famous for being the head AI scientist over at Meta and is now going off on his own.
He announced this officially, but I think it's been basically Silicon Valley's worst kept secret.
Everyone knows this is what he's been focusing on.
And he has made it clear that he is not going to be serving as the company's CEO.
We're going to get into all of the drama what the company does, who's running it, how much he can expect to make, how much other players in similar positions and situations have made.
All of that on the show today.
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So let's get into what Yann LeCun is working on.
Of course he is a scientist who has had a lot of public drama on X.
I think like a year ago he left the platform when Elon Musk took it over.
He had a lot of drama with Elon.
And sadly, I felt like I didn't really see much from him after that happened.
He kind of, I think, got shuffled down at Meta.
Zuckerberg was probably upset that Meta was falling behind in the AI race.
The head of Meta AI.
The CEO of Meta AI was acquired from another company and it felt like Yann LeCun kind of lost some of his shine over there.
But no fear, he is a renowned scientist and he decided to start his own company, and that is called Advanced Machine Intelligence or AMI.
And essentially they went and got Alex LeBrun, who's the co-founder and CEO of the medical transcription AI, which is called NABLA.
He is going to be leading the company as the chief executive.
And Nabla said that Lacan's new role, they essentially did this whole press release about it.
And Lacan, Jan Lacan, also confirmed in a LinkedIn post that this is what's happening.
Of course, he can't post on X because he's got drama on X. He hops back on every once in a while.
We get the rare pleasure of seeing him on X.
He said, yes, AMI Labs is my new startup.
I am the executive chairman and Alex Lebrun is transitioning from CEO of NABLA to CEO of AMI Labs.
AMI Labs is looking apparently to 500 million euros.
That's about 586 million dollars at a three billion dollar valuation, or about three point five billion dollars before they've even launched.
This is according to the Financial Times, who cited some people that are familiar with all of this.
Given how aggressively investors are backing AI startups right now which were founded by the kind of globally recognized researchers, I think this is not that shocking by today's standards.
Like for comparison, we can look at the former OpenAI CTO, which is Miriam Maradi.
She started Thinking Machine Labs.
It was valued at $12 billion in its seed round last year.
And Maradi also doesn't have the same kind of level of success, academic and industry credibility that I think a lot of people give to Yan.
So I think, you know, like Lacan, he's a professor at New York University.
He's a former VP and chief AI scientist at Meta.
He's also a recipient of the prestigious AM Turing Award for his work on reinforcement learning.
So I think recently there was this whole press release about it.
It kind of confirmed what a lot of people in the industry already assumed.
AMI Labs is focused on world model AI.
So essentially, it's just a different approach from large language models.
They're attempting to give the AI systems an understanding of their entire environment so they can simulate cause and effect and they can explore what if scenarios to predict outcomes.
A lot of proponents believe that world models are the answer to the structural hallucination problems that a lot of these LLMs have, because LLMs they're not, you know, deterministic by nature, meaning like they're not designed to be creative.
They can never be fully trusted not to just make up information.
There's a bunch of other top labs and startups, like Google, DeepMind and Fifi Lee's startup WorldLabs that are also building these world models.
And I think like if we're comparing it to that, AMI's fundraising ambitions do look pretty bold.
Like these are pretty big.
When WorldLabs launched, Lee raised 230 million at a 1 billion valuation worldwide, which was considered, you know, like insane at the time or not insane, but was, you know, quite impressive.
And that was back in August of last year, which in AI terms, might have well been, you know, 100 years ago.
Meanwhile, I think also Nablus said that it's going to begin searching for a new CEO that is going to run it in the interim, or sorry, in the interim it'll be run by the co-founder and COO, Delphine Grohl, who's not yet been named the permanent chief executive.
So that company also announced a partnership to use AMI's models as they are developed.
So it's kind of interesting because they you know he's leaving the company, but they obviously have a great relationship or they're going to have a great relationship with AMI.
So NABLA has raised $120 million in total.
There's, you know they did like a 70 million Series C in June from a bunch of high profile backers.
They had Lacan himself who invested in the company.
You had Tony Fadel's Build Collective, HVI Capital, Highland Europe, and Cathy Innovation.
So I think these companies are definitely intertwined.
I think Lacan, as an investor in that company, you know, obviously had a great relationship with the CEO and was able to pull him in.
So LeBrun, who is going to be the new CEO of AMI, he is a really strong pick, I think, to leave the company.
He's been working on a bunch of different multimodal AI models since before COVID.
This was very popular.
He started at Nuance Communications back in like the early 2010s, back when Nuance powered Apple's Siri.
And then back then, the assistant was still kind of considered this really cutting edge technology.
Today, Siri is... a piece of garbage, a flaming piece of garbage.
But back then, this was quite amazing stuff.
Microsoft later acquired Nuance, and LeBrun went on to found and sell multiple natural language startups, including one that was acquired by Facebook before he was running Facebook's AI division.
And then he later founded Nabla back in 2018.
So LeBrun said that NABLA is, you know, a favorite within the Paris AI startup scene.
It is growing a lot.
He said, we have more than tripled our live ARR this year, up next $1 billion.
He said that as he's kind of was telling everyone that he was going to be leaving as the CEO.
So he's like, look, we did great on the company.
We grew it a lot. but it is time for me to go.
So it's gonna be fascinating to see what happens with this.
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