Meta Video Generation Researcher Joins AMI Labs, a $10.3B Seed-Funded World Model Startup

AIMPACT Update: On May 18 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by Beating, Andrew Brown, a video generation researcher at Meta FAIR, announced his departure and will join AMI Labs. He will serve as a member of the technical team at this AI startup co-founded by Yann LeCun, former Chief AI Scientist of Meta and Turing Award laureate, and will collaborate with co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Xie Saining. During his three years at Meta, Brown focused primarily on video generation. Meta’s official publications list him as one of the authors of Emu Video and a core contributor to the Movie Gen technical report. These two projects represent Meta’s comprehensive media generation model suite, spanning from text-to-video generation to 1080p high-definition video, video editing, personalized video, and synchronized audio generation. AMI Labs is betting on world models—AI systems that learn physical, motion, and causal laws from real-world data. The company completed a $1.03 billion seed round in March 2026, with a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion. In his departure post, Brown also stated his new focus as “advancing the frontiers of world models.” From Emu Video and Movie Gen to AMI Labs, this move signals that video generation researchers are increasingly shifting toward the more foundational world models赛道. World models have evolved from an academic pursuit into a startup direction capable of attracting top researchers and billions in funding. (Source: BlockBeats)