After 12 years at Meta, LeCun founded AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence) to build "world models" — explicitly rejecting the LLM paradigm. Paris-headquartered, targeting €3.5B valuation before launching a product. Publicly stated "I use Gemini" on LinkedIn. The most consequential AI researcher departure since Karpathy left OpenAI — signals a genuine schism over whether language models are a dead end for general intelligence.