This Guy Left Meta, Started a Company With 12 People, and Just Raised $1 Billion

Yann LeCun is one of the godfathers of modern AI. He won the Turing Award (basically the Nobel Prize of computing) and spent years as Meta's chief AI scientist. Then late last year, he quit.

His reason? He believes Meta, OpenAI, Google, and basically every big AI company are all making the same mistake. They're all building AI the same way, and LeCun thinks that approach will eventually hit a wall.

So he started his own company called AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs) to try something different. The company is literally one month old and has just 12 employees.

And investors just handed him over $1 billion.

The funding round values AMI Labs at $3.5 billion. Jeff Bezos (yes, the Amazon guy) and Mark Cuban are among the backers. That's roughly $290 million per employee if you're keeping score.

What's wild is this isn't even unusual anymore. In the past few months, multiple AI startups founded by researchers who left big tech companies have raised billions. One called Project Prometheus pulled in $6.2 billion. Two others are valued above $4 billion each.

Even as some analysts warn we might be in an AI bubble, the money keeps flowing. The bet? That one of these startups will crack the code on truly intelligent machines before the giants do.

As reported by The New York Times.

Source: The New York Times