Former Meta A.I. Chief’s Start-Up Is Valued at $3.5 Billion
Late last year, Yann LeCun left his job as chief A.I. scientist at Meta to launch a start-up.
Arguing that Meta and other leading artificial intelligence companies would eventually hit a dead end with their single-minded approach to building intelligent machines, he planned to take a different tack with his new company.
Now, his start-up, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, or AMI Labs, has raised over $1 billion in seed funding from investors in the United States, Europe and Asia. Some are familiar names like Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Mark Cuban, a minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, while others are less recognizable venture capital firms.
Although AMI Labs is only a month old and employs only 12 people, this funding round values the company at $3.5 billion.
The deal, announced on Tuesday, shows that investors are still willing to make enormous bets on experienced A.I. researchers. Even as many financial analysts and industry insiders warn of an A.I. bubble, investors have poured enormous amounts of money into several new start-ups in recent months, including Project Prometheus, which raised $6.2 billion from Mr. Bezos and others.
