LeCun named to TIME’s AI 100 after $1B bet against LLMs

Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning AI pioneer who helped create the foundations of modern deep learning, has been named to TIME's Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.78% 100 Most Influential People in AI for 2026 — a recognition that comes months after he raised $1.03 billion for a startup built on the premise that the AI industry's dominant approach is a dead end.

A Billion-Dollar Contrarian Bet

LeCun departed Meta ↗ 0.84% in late 2024 after 12 years leading its AI research efforts, and in March 2026, his Paris-based venture Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs — known as AMI Labs — closed one of the largest seed rounds ever raised by a European startup. The $1.03 billion round valued the company at $3.5 billion pre-money and was co-led by Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, with backing from Nvidia ↗ 2.78%, Samsung, Temasek, and Toyota Ventures, among others.businessinsider+1

While much of the AI industry has poured resources into scaling large language models, LeCun argues that approach will never produce human-level intelligence. AMI Labs is instead building "world models" — AI systems that learn from physical reality rather than text, developing an intuitive understanding of how objects move and events unfold.techcrunch+1

"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," CEO Alexandre LeBrun said in a post on X in March.businessinsider

A Long Road From Theory to Product

LeBrun, who previously founded the healthcare startup Nabla, 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 technical foundations rest on LeCun's Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or JEPA, proposed in 2022. The startup plans to publish its research openly and release much of its code as open source.techcrunch

AMI Labs is building teams across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore, with Saining Xie serving as chief science officer and Laurent Solly, Meta's former VP for Europe, as COO.businessinsider+1

TIME Recognition Underscores a Shifting Landscape

On August 27, TIME published its fourth annual list of the 100 most influential figures in AI, with LeCun among the honorees. The list also featured Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, whose World Labs is pursuing related "spatial intelligence" research, and MIT professor Daniela Rus, who is advancing "embodied intelligence" in robotics. According to Forbes, venture investors committed more than $3 billion to world model startups in the first half of 2026 alone — a sign that LeCun's contrarian vision is rapidly gaining mainstream traction.time+3