Yann LeCun, the Turing Award winner and Meta’s former chief A.I. scientist, left Meta in late 2025 to build a multibillion-dollar startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), based on the premise that the race toward A.I. superintelligence is starting from the wrong place. Speaking at the VivaTech conference on June 17, LeCun shared details about his Paris-based company, which raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation earlier this year. LeCun, 65, told Wired’s Steven Levy that “there is a requirement for new paradigms to go beyond the limitations of current systems,” arguing that building better language models is “kind of a slow way.” AMI Labs is building “world models” that learn from reality, understand consequences, predict what happens next, and choose the best actions based on those predictions. LeCun believes much of Silicon Valley has become “LLM-pilled,” resulting in a “monoculture” of A.I. systems that are powerful in some areas but still fundamentally limited. He said AMI has its roots as an internal FAIR project and had support from company leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth.