Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social media giant to start his own venture, as the company undergoes a significant overhaul of its AI operations led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The Financial Times reports that Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, is set to depart the company in the coming months to launch his own start-up. LeCun, a Turing Award winner and one of the pioneers of modern AI, has informed associates of his plans, according to people familiar with the conversations. The impending move comes as Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, seeks to radically reshape the company’s AI strategy to compete with rivals such as OpenAI and Google in developing more advanced AI technologies.
LeCun, who has headed Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab (Fair) since 2013, is reportedly in early talks to raise funds for his new venture. His decision to leave coincides with Zuckerberg’s pivot away from the longer-term research work conducted at Fair, instead focusing on the rapid rollout of AI models and products after realizing that Meta had fallen behind the competition.
As part of this strategic shift, Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder of data-labelling start-up Scale AI, to lead a new “superintelligence” team at Meta. The company paid more than $14 billion to hire Wang and acquire a 49 per cent interest in his company. Additionally, Zuckerberg personally selected an exclusive team, called TBD Lab, to accelerate the development of the next iteration of Meta’s large language models, offering staff from rivals such as OpenAI and Google massive pay packages to join the effort.
Consequently, LeCun, who previously reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, now reports to Wang. This change in reporting structure follows the underwhelming release of Meta’s most recent Llama 4 model.
LeCun has long maintained that the large language models (LLMs) that Zuckerberg has prioritized in his strategy, while useful, will never be able to reason and plan like humans. This stance appears increasingly at odds with his boss’s AI vision. Within Fair, LeCun has focused on developing a new generation of AI systems called “world models,” which aim to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data rather than just language. However, he has acknowledged that it could take a decade to fully develop this architecture.
According to two people familiar with the matter, LeCun’s next endeavor will focus on furthering his work on world models. His departure marks the latest in a series of exits and leadership and organizational changes at Meta during a tumultuous year for Zuckerberg’s company. In May, vice-president of AI research Joelle Pineau left and recently joined Canadian AI start-up Cohere. Last month, Meta also laid off about 600 people from its AI research unit to cut costs, eliminate bureaucracy, and release products more quickly.
Read more at the Financial Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
