Good morning. Who’s the biggest media company of them all? Disney’s incoming CEO Josh D’Amaro may not like the answer his magic mirror provides when he takes the reins from Bob Iger next week. According to a new report by MoffettNathanson, YouTube has dethroned Disney as the world’s top media company by revenue.
It’s a big achievement for YouTube, the Google-owned video streaming site, and for its CEO Neal Mohan. It’s also interesting when you consider that Disney built its empire through the power of sterling intellectual property like Mickey Mouse, Ariel, and Dumbo, whereas the stars of YouTube—MrBeast, PewdiePie, and the Brothers Paul (Jake and Logan)—are all free agents made of flesh and blood.
It’s tempting to conclude that eyeballs are more valuable than owned-and-operated hit franchises in the modern media landscape. YouTube doesn’t need its own cast of homegrown characters—so long it has the biggest audience, the stars will continue to flock to its platform. Can that ever create a media company with real staying power and a Disney-like legacy though? Just two years from now, in 2028, Mickey Mouse will turn 100. Will anyone be wearing a MrBeast T-shirt in 100 years? (I probably won’t be around to tell you…)
Today’s tech news below.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
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Yann LeCun's raises $1 billion in bet against LLMs
Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning AI researcher who spent years as Meta's chief AI scientist, has raised Europe's largest-ever seed round for his new start-up. LeCun’s Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs raised $1.03 billion from backers including Nvidia, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, France's Cathay Innovation, and Seoul-based SBVA. The round is second only to U.S. start-up Thinking Machines Lab, which raised a $2 billion seed round last June, according to The Financial Times. LeCun's Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs is now valued at $3.5 billion pre-money.
The company's central bet is that large language models are the wrong tool for building truly intelligent systems. LeCun has long argued that text-trained models can't achieve human-level reasoning, and AMI Labs will instead develop what he calls "world models"—systems trained on video and spatial data that can retain memory, reason, and plan complex actions, with potential applications in robotics and transport.
AMI Labs will be led by Alexandre LeBrun, former CEO of French health tech start-up Nabla, with LeCun serving as executive chair (LeCun & LeBrun has a nice ring to it). Laurent Solly, Meta's former VP for Europe, is also joining the venture as COO. The company has offices in Paris, New York, Singapore, and Montreal, and about a dozen employees.—Beatrice Nolan
Meta grabs Moltbook
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like other social networks getting attention—even if the social network is for AI agents, not humans.
On Tuesday, Meta acquired Moltbook, the “social network for AI agents" that went viral a few weeks ago, Axios reported.
Moltbook garnered headlines with reports that AI agents were using the platform to discuss ways to escape human control and develop secret communication channels—although these posts were later found to be either written directly by humans or written in response to specific prompts from human users, rather than anything the agents hit upon spontaneously. Moltbook also attracted attention for being full of prompt injection attacks, malware, and scams.
Nonetheless, Meta apparently sees value in it (though no price was disclosed). As part of the deal, Moltbook’s creators—AI agent developer Matt Schlicht and tech journalist Ben Parr—will join Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. The acquisition highlights Meta’s growing focus on AI agents and multi-agent systems, with the Moltbook technology offering a registry and social layer that could help agents collaborate and perform complex tasks for users and businesses.—Jeremy Kahn
Amazon bolsters AI coding safeguards
Amazon is beefing up safeguards to ensure that AI-generated computer code is up to snuff and doesn't negatively affect its operations.
Tech leaders at the company focused on a string of recent outages on Tuesday during a weekly meeting, according to reports in the FT and CNBC. According to CNBC at least one of the outages is tied to AI-assisted coding errors. An internal document seen by the news organization initially referenced a "trend of incidents" involving GenAI tools, though the mention of GenAI was later deleted, according to CNBC.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, like the CEOs at just about every tech company, has been very vocal about the benefits of using AI tools. In a Linkedin post last year he said Amazon had saved "4,500 developer years of work" thanks to Amazon's Q generative AI assistant. Some of those developers may have put some hours back in—Amazon now plans to reinforce safeguards including additional review of Gen AI-assisted production changes, the company said in an internal memo also viewed by CNBC.—AO
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—Polymarket taps Palantir. AI to police sports betting
—Google's Jeff Dean backs Anthropic in Pentagon fight. Joins other Googlers and OpenAI workers
—YouTube's deepfake detector—For politicos and journos
—AI could give you a 15-hour workweek. It’s not playing out that way
