Yann LeCun has been named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2026, months after raising $1.03 billion for a startup built around an alternative to large language models.
TIME published its fourth annual AI 100 list on Aug. 27, with LeCun among the honorees alongside Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li and MIT professor Daniela Rus.
LeCun left Meta in late 2024 after 12 years leading its AI research efforts. In March 2026, his Paris-based startup Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, or AMI Labs, closed a $1.03 billion seed round that valued the company at $3.5 billion pre-money.
The round was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions, with backing from Nvidia, Samsung, Temasek and Toyota Ventures.
LeCun has argued that scaling large language models will not produce human-level intelligence. AMI Labs is instead building what it calls world models, systems designed to learn from physical reality rather than text.
“We have secured a $1.03 billion USD seed round to fuel our mission to build intelligent systems capable of truly understanding the real world, a long-term scientific endeavor,” Chief Executive Alexandre LeBrun said in a post on X in March.
LeBrun told TechCrunch that AMI Labs is “a very ambitious project, because it starts with fundamental research. It’s not your typical applied AI startup that can release a product in three months”.
The company’s work is based on LeCun’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or JEPA, proposed in 2022. TechCrunch reported that the startup plans to publish its research and release much of its code as open source.
AMI Labs is building teams in Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore. Saining Xie is chief science officer and Laurent Solly, Meta’s former vice president for Europe, is chief operating officer.
Forbes reported that venture investors committed more than $3 billion to world model startups in the first half of 2026.
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