Yann LeCun Leaves Meta, Founds AMI Labs at $3.5B Pre-Launch Valuation

Yann LeCun Leaves Meta, Founds AMI Labs at $3.5B Pre-Launch Valuation

Yann LeCun, longtime Chief AI Scientist at Meta, departed the company in late 2025 and has founded AMI Labs in Paris — a new AI research organization valued at $3.5B before its public launch. AMI Labs is focused on world models rather than LLMs, consistent with LeCun's public position that language models are a fundamental dead end for achieving human-like intelligence. LeCun pioneered CNNs at Bell Labs in 1989, received the Turing Award in 2018, and spent years as Meta's most prominent AI leader.

Why It Matters

A $3.5B pre-launch valuation for a world-model-first lab signals that investors are hedging against pure-LLM architectures — and that LeCun's sustained critique of the transformer paradigm is being taken seriously with real capital.