Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), co-founded by Yann LeCun — Meta's former chief AI scientist — has closed a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. The raise is extraordinary: AMI Labs is only four months old, making this one of the largest seed rounds ever recorded. LeCun, long a critic of large language models' limitations, is reportedly pursuing fundamentally different AI architectures. The funding follows a broader Q1 2026 trend in which AI captured 80% of all global venture capital. With $1 billion in hand at founding, AMI Labs enters the AI race with resources most Series C companies never see.