AMI is hiring for scale, not just research. LeCun is making the public case for the world-model bet
This week, we added three new hires identified at AMI, spanning London, New York, and Singapore; a dedicated talent-sourcing role posted in Paris; and newly surfaced seed investors, all of which point to a company moving from founding team to functioning organization. That operational push runs alongside a sustained public campaign by Yann LeCun — at VivaTech, RAISE, and ETH Zürich — hammering home the same thesis: LLMs have hit their ceiling, world models are the path forward, and Europe has a window. The two tracks are not separate; AMI is visibly staffing up to pursue the research agenda LeCun is loudly advertising.
Three hires in three cities reveal an infrastructure and multimodal agenda beneath the world-model rhetoric
hiringThe most telling hiring signal this week is not any single appointment but the combination. Amir Bar — an assistant professor at Imperial College London and a former Meta researcher — brings serious computer vision and multimodal credentials to AMI's London footprint. Ayaan Naveed Malik, a recent Stanford graduate joining in New York, arrives with a background in robotics and multimodal AI, exactly the domains where JEPA-style world models need to prove themselves. Together they suggest AMI is assembling the technical bench to move from theory to working systems.
The third hire is Haoyi Li, who is joining in Singapore. He is not a machine-learning researcher, but rather a large-scale developer infrastructure engineer known for work at Databricks and Dropbox, and the author of the Mill build tool. His GitHub activity this week — closing issues in his own `com-lihaoyi/mill` repo and commenting on a Scala 3 pull request — confirms he is already active on infrastructure concerns. Hiring someone of Li's profile at this stage signals that AMI is taking the underlying engineering platform seriously, not just the research layer above it.
A talent-sourcing hire and newly surfaced investors signal AMI is preparing for a larger recruiting push
administrativeThe one new job posting this week is not a researcher or engineer: it is a Talent Intelligence & Sourcing Partner, based in Paris, sitting inside General and Administration. Hiring dedicated recruiting infrastructure at this stage is a forward-looking signal. A new in-house recruiter suggests AMI's leadership expects the headcount curve to steepen materially in the months ahead.
Introducing 224 Ventures
What is AMI Labs?
Advanced Machine Intelligence is one of the most closely watched AI startups in the world. Founded in 2025 by Yann LeCun and Alexandre LeBrun, it's building AI systems that reason about the physical world, not just language.
About the company →What are World Models?
World Models are AI systems that learn an internal representation of how the world works — enabling machines to plan, predict, and reason about physical reality the way humans do.
The science →The Team
AMI Labs has assembled researchers, engineers, and operators across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore. We track every key hire and leadership change as the team grows.
Meet the team →How a world model sees the future
Given what it observes, the model reconstructs the present and rolls out what happens next — a prediction of physics, not a retrieval of text. Below: a reacher arm, its reconstruction, and the model's forecast, side by side.
Global hiring accelerates
AMI Labs begins scaling its team across Paris, New York, Montreal, and Singapore — recruiting world-class researchers, engineers, and operators to build World Models.
$1.03B seed round at $3.5B valuation
AMI Labs closes a landmark $1.03 billion seed round — one of the largest in AI history — backed by Jeff Bezos, Bezos Expeditions, NVIDIA, Samsung, Eric Schmidt, and 60+ investors.
Yann LeCun joins as Executive Chairman
Turing Award laureate and former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun co-founds AMI Labs, bringing his vision for World Models and next-generation machine intelligence.
AMI Labs brand launched
PengyouCo rebrands as Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), unveiling its mission to build AI systems that go beyond language — grounded in the physical world.
Corporate structure formalised
Articles of association updated with early share restructuring: 1,000,000 shares divided into ordinary shares and SP preference shares carrying 10× voting rights.
Every Monday, The French Tech Journal sends a digest of the latest AMI Labs news — funding, research, hiring, and more. Independent coverage. No spin.
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