Yann LeCun’s World Model AI Ambition Explained

0:00Jan 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.

0:40all of that on the show today. But before we do, if you want to try all of the AI models that I talk about on the show, including everything from OpenAI, Meta, Grok, and so many more, there's over 40 different models on AIbox.ai. I'd love for you to try it out. It's my own startup. I give you access for$20 a month to everything, including 11 labs for audio and a ton of amazing image models. Go check it out. I'll leave a link in the description to AIbox.ai. eye. So let's get into what Yan Lekan 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.

1:19He 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 Jan Lekan 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.

1:59He 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, you know, he's got drama on X. He hops back on every once in a while. We get the rare work pleasure of seeing him on X. He said, yes, AMI Labs is my new startup. I am the executive chairman. and Alex LeBron 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 3.5 billion dollars before they've even launched.

2:51This 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 Marati. She started Thinking Machine Labs. It was valued at$12 billion in its seed round last year. And Marati also doesn't have the same kind of level of academic and industry credibility that I think a lot of people give to Yan. So I I think, you know, like Lacan, he's a professor at New York University.

3:29He'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 right 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.

4:19There's a bunch of other top labs and startups like Google DeepMind and Fifi Lee's startup World Labs 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 World Labs launched, Lee raised$230 million at a$1 billion valuation, which was considered, you know, like insane at the time or not insane, but it 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 Nabla 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 Grawl, who's not yet been named the permanent chief executive.

5:05So 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 Fadell's Build Collective, HVI Capital, Highland Europe, and Cathy Innovation. So I think these companies are definitely intertwined.

5:42I 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 LeBron, who is going to be the new CEO of AMI, he is a really strong pick, I think, to lead the company. He's been working on a bunch of different multimodal AI models since before 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.

6:19But back then, this was quite amazing stuff. Microsoft later acquired Nuance and LeBron 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. um 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 one billion dollars um he said that as he's kind of was telling everyone that he was going to be leaving as the ceo um so he's like look we 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 thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today if you enjoyed it make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast we are getting close to the christmas season and that is the number one christmas present you could give me i would be absolutely thrilled thanks so much for tuning in and i hope you have a fantastic rest of your day as always make sure to check out aibox.ai to get access to over 40 ai models all in one place all right i'll see you in the next episode