Meta’s AI Chief Scientist Yann LeCun set to exit, to launch new AI startup: Report

Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social-media behemoth to found his own start-up, as per a new report by the Financial Times. The news comes at a time when Mark Zuckerberg has been overhauling Meta’s AI efforts, with the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs earlier in the year.

LeCun is a widely recognised luminary in the AI field and a Turing Award winner. He is also a Silver Professor of data science, neural science, and computer engineering at New York University.

He has reportedly told his associates that he will leave Meta in the coming months. He is also said to be in early talks to raise funds for a new venture.

In the last few months, Zuckerberg has looked away from the long-term research work at the Meta Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR), which has been headed by LeCun since 2013.

Earlier in the year, Zuckerberg also hired former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the Meta Superintelligence Labs unit to compete against the likes of OpenAI and Google. As a result of the reshuffles, LeCun, who had previously reported to Meta chief product officer Chris Cox, is now said to be reporting to the 28-year-old techie.

Meanwhile, LeCun has also been a critic of using LLMs — the brains behind AI chatbots — as a strategy to advance the goal of superintelligence, which has appeared at odds with Zuckerberg’s strategy.

He has instead focused on developing a new generation of AI systems which he reportedly hopes could power machines with human-level intelligence, called “world models”. These systems are said to be able to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data, rather than just language. However, LeCun has said that it could take a decade to fully develop the architecture. LeCun is reportedly focused on furthering his work on world models.

Meta’s high-profile exits:

Earlier in the year, Zuckerberg poached many tech executives with lucrative, multi-million-dollar pay packages. However, since then, the tech giant has also been struck with a series of departures.

In May this year, Meta’s vice-president of AI research Joelle Pineau left the company and joined Canadian AI startup Cohere. The company also laid off 600 employees from its AI research unit in an effort to cut costs.

Meta CEO Zuckerberg is also reportedly under pressure to justify the billions of dollars in spending that the company has done on developing superintelligence.