AI Pioneer Yann LeCun Leaves Meta After 12 Years to Launch World Models Startup

Meta's Chief AI Scientist is leaving the company after 12 years

One of Meta's top AI researchers, Yann LeCun, is leaving after 12 years with the company to found his own AI startup, he announced. LeCun, who is also a professor at New York University, joined the company in 2013 to lead Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab and later took on the role of Chief AI Scientist. LeCun said his new startup would "continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond" and that it would partner with Meta. "The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences," he wrote in an update on Threads. "AMI will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta's commercial interests, but many of which do not. Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact." Speculation about LeCun's future at Meta has been mounting in recent months. Earlier this year, the company invested nearly $15 billion into Scale AI and made the 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, its Chief AI Officer. Meta also recruited Shengjia Zhao, who helped create GPT-4, making him Chief AI Scientist of its newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs unit. LeCun, on the other hand, has been openly skeptical of LLMs. "We are not going to get to human-level AI by just scaling LLMs," he said during an appearance on the Big technology podcast earlier this year. And in a recent talk at a conference, he advised aspiring researchers to "absolutely not work on LLMs," according to remarks reported by The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, Meta has been reshuffling its AI teams. The company cut "several hundred" jobs from its Superintelligence group, including from FAIR, last month. And LeCun has "had difficulty getting resources for his projects at Meta as the company focused more intently on building models to compete with immediate threats from rivals including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Anthropic," Bloomberg reported. LeCun said he will stay on at Meta until the end of the year. "I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of the AMI program over the last few years," he wrote.

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to leave Meta and start new AI research company

NEW YORK (AP) -- Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year. LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can "understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." He said Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlap with Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not. LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta's AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research. LeCun stepped down as the group's director in 2018 but has remained Meta's chief AI scientist. He's also a part-time professor at New York University, where has taught since 2003. LeCun spent his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could "read" text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is leaving to create his own startup

Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, speaks at the Viva Tech conference in Paris, June 13, 2023. Yann LeCun, known as one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence and one of the first AI visionaries to join the company then known as Facebook, is leaving Meta. LuCun said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that he plans to create a startup that specializes in a kind of AI technology that researchers have described as world models, analyzing information beyond web data in order to better represent the physical world and its properties. "I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond," LeCun wrote. "The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." Meta will partner with LeCun's startup. The departure comes at a time of disarray within Meta's AI unit, which was dramatically overhauled this year after the company released the fourth version of its Llama open-source large language model to a disappointing response from developers. That spurred CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spend billions of dollars recruiting top AI talent, including a June $14.5 billion investment in Scale AI to lure the startup's 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang, now Meta's new chief AI officer. LeCun, 65, joined Facebook in 2013 to be director of the FAIR AI research division while maintaining a part-time professorial position at New York University. At the time, Facebook and Google were heavily recruiting high-level academics like LeCun to spearhead their efforts to produce cutting-edge computer science research that could potentially benefit their core businesses and products. LeCun, along with other AI luminaries like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, centered their academic research on a kind of AI technique known as deep learning, which involves the training of enormous software systems called neural networks so they can discover patterns within reams of data. The researchers helped popularize the deep learning approach, and in 2019 won the prestigious Turing Award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery. Since then, LeCun's approach to AI development has drifted from the direction taken by Meta and the rest of Silicon Valley. Meta and other tech companies like OpenAI have spent billions of dollars in developing so-called foundation models, particularly LLMs, as part of their efforts to advance state-of-the-art computing. However, LeCun and other deep-learning experts, have said that these current AI models, while powerful, have a limited understanding of the world, and new computing architectures are needed for researchers to create software that's on par with or surpasses humans on certain tasks, a notion known as artificial general intelligence. "As I envision it, AMI will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta's commercial interests, but many of which do not," LeCun said in the post. "Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact." Besides Wang, other recent notables that Zuckerberg brought in to revamp Meta's AI unit include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who heads the unit's product team, and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, the group's chief scientist. In October, Meta laid off 600 employees from its Superintelligence Labs division, including some who were part of the FAIR unit that LeCun helped get off the ground. Those layoffs and other cuts to FAIR over the years, coupled with a new AI leadership team, played a major role in LeCun's decision to leave, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak publicly. Additionally, LeCun rarely interacted with Wang nor TBD Labs unit, which is compromised of many of the headline-grabbing hires Zuckerberg made over the summer. TBD Labs oversees the development of Meta's Llama AI models, which were originally developed within FAIR, the people said. While LeCun was always a champion of sharing AI research and related technologies to the open-source community, Wang and his team favor a more closed approach amid intense competition from rivals like OpenAI and Google, the people said.

AI godfather Yann LeCun to leave Meta and start own firm

Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the "godfathers" of artificial intelligence was in St James's Palace being handed an award from King Charles for his work in artificial intelligence (AI). Professor Yann LeCun was being honoured along with six other recipients for his contributions to the field, which have been credited as advancing deep learning. But Mr LeCun is at odds with some of the AI world over the future of the generation-defining technology. And now he is going all-in on his idea of "advanced machine intelligence" after announcing he is leaving his role as Meta's chief AI scientist to start a new firm. During his 12 years at the company, Prof LeCun won the prestigious Turing Award and witnessed several flurries of excitement around AI - not least the most recent boom in generative AI accelerated by rival OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. But his departure comes amid speculation the AI boom could meet an abrupt end should the so-called "AI bubble" of ballooning valuations and soaring spending burst. Investors, analysts and even big tech bosses like Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai have said a market correction to the AI sector would ripple across the wider economy.

Yann LeCun Leaves Meta to Create 'Independent Entity'

A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg Wednesday that AI legend Yann LeCun is exiting Zuckland and striking out on his own. According to a Memo from LeCun himself that Bloomberg claims to have read, LeCun's new endeavor is meant to “bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.†Sources apparently told Bloomberg that LeCun "clashed with others internally." Meta had recently constructed a fully separate AI research department focused on generative AI, and in its latest story, Bloomberg now claims that Meta had begun to hide LeCun from view in favor of high-profile recent hires. Recent hires have invluded ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao. As previously discussed here at Gizmodo, LeCun is fascinated by an area of AI called “world models.†He has spent more than a year saying he thinks LLM research, the backbone of systems like ChatGPT, is no longer a worthy area of pursuitâ€"at least as far as hypothetical advanced AI functions with terms like “AGI†and “superintelligence†are concerned. LeCun, who was born and raised in France, is among the handful of researchers often referred to as the “godfathers of AI,†or more specifically the godfathers of deep learning, and shared a Turing Award in 2019 with fellow godfathers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The influential cognitive scientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus is a longtime critic of LeCun, and their public disagreements go back years. LeCun joined Meta in 2013, when it was still called Facebook, as the head of what at the time was a research operation with a location in New York that LeCun could walk to from his office at NYU, where he works as a professor. At the time, it wasn’t totally clear what a company like Facebook even wanted from a scientist who worked with deep neural networks. Another major AI researcher, Andrew Ng, explained Facebook’s hiring decision to Wired in terms that now seem sort of quaint and social media-centric: "Machine learning is already used in hundreds of places throughout Facebook, ranging from photo tagging to ranking articles to your news feed. Better machine learning will be able to help improve all of these features, as well as help Facebook create new applications that none of us have dreamed of yet." After the 2022 release of ChatGPT led to AI’s rise to domination of all priorities in the tech world, LeCun became notable for his skepticism about the need for AI safety. He told the Wall Street Journal last year that the idea that AI poses a threat to humanity is “complete B.S.†But LLMs aren't LeCun's cup of tea anyway. He clarified last month that he had almost no involvement with Meta's Llama models, and that such generative AI-related work happened way off in another department at Meta. LeCun worked, he explained, in Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) department, and was attempting to go "beyond LLMs." LeCun believes AI models are needed that can comprehensively understand the physical world through sensory inputs like vision, and how to reason its way through interactions with, and changes to, that world. He thinks the current crop of AI systems can't do anything even close to this, and that they are in fact dumber than cats. You can already see the start of LeCun's world model research under the aegis of Meta in V-JEPA-2. That model is trained not on text, but on videos of the physical world, and designed not simply to replicate all that video, like Sora, but to model the causes and effects of actions in the world when things move around and interact. That's the theory anyway. Bloomberg writes that Meta "plans to partner with LeCun on his startup, though details are still being finalized." In LeCun's memo, he wrote that his former company “will be a partner of the new company and will have access to its innovations.†It's not at all clear yet how the partnership between LeCun's new company and Meta will be structured, but tech companies are famous for being near inextricable from one another where AI is concerned. Microsoft owns about 27% of OpenAI, and has special rights to use its technology. Google similarly owns 14% of Anthropic. The way interdependent investments in the AI world lead to higher valuations has been compared to "circular dealmaking." LeCun's memo says his new technology “will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not.†LeCun famously favors the term Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) in place of something like AGI (nota bene: "ami" is French for "friend"). In his memo, he reportedly wrote that "Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact.†It's an appropriately ambiguous turn of phrase. Presumably the "independent entity" is the new, non-Meta company, not an intelligent entity. Though he may mean that too.Â

French 'AI godfather' Yann LeCun leaving Meta to launch own start-up

LeCun has previously said he does not agree that LLMs, which Meta is investing billions into, are the future of intelligence. The French 'godfather of AI', Yann LeCun, announced he is leaving Meta to start his own machine learning company to "bring the next revolution of AI". LeCun said he will leave his post as Meta's chief artificial intelligence researcher at the end of the year. "As many of you have heard through rumours or recent media articles, I am planning to leave Meta after 12 years: 5 years as founding director of FAIR and 7 years as Chief AI Scientist," he wrote on LinkedIn on Wednesday. LeCun has been vocal that large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Meta's Llama, are limited and will not lead to real computer intelligence, despite Meta pouring millions of dollars into it. "LLMs are great, they're useful, we should invest in them -- a lot of people are going to use them," said LeCun at an event on Sunday. "They are not a path to human-level intelligence. They're just not. Right now, they are sucking the air out of the room anywhere they go -- and so there's basically no resources [left] for anything else. And so for the next revolution, we need to take a step back and figure out what's missing from the current approaches," he added. LeCun has said he believes real computer intelligence will come from so-called world models, which learn with visual data, such as watching videos, instead. Rather than predicting the next word, as LLMs do, they predict what happens in the next world and how things evolve over time with the goal of learning cause-and-effect. LeCun said the aim of his new start-up was to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program he had been pursuing at FAIR and NYU. "The goal of the start-up is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences," he said. AMI, which is the French word for friend, will have "far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta's commercial interests, but many of which do not," he added. LeCun said that developing AMI as "an independent entity is a way to maximise its broad impact". He thanked Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and said that because of his and other Meta executives' previous interest in AMI, Meta will be a "partner in the new company". However, LeCun did not specify the nature of the partnership.

Meta's chief AI scientist exits company to begin working on new AI startup - SiliconANGLE

Meta's chief AI scientist exits company to begin working on new AI startup After 12 years at Meta Platforms Inc. the artificial intelligence visionary Yann LeCun is out the door and about to embark on a mission to be part of what he calls the next big revolution in AI. Known as one of the Godfathers of AI, LeCun (pictured) left France decades ago to work at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 2013, he joined what was then Facebook Inc. to work at the Fundamental AI Research, FAIR, lab, later becoming the company's chief AI scientist. Following a recent shakeup at Meta as the company attempts to stay ahead of competitors in the AI space, a handful of AI researchers left. LeCun hasn't yet publicly expressed whether the reported chaotic environment at Meta was a factor in his departure. However, a report in Bloomberg said that LeCun had "clashed with others internally." In an effort to catch up with the likes of OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC, and Google LLC, Meta has poured $15 billion into Scale AI, making Alexandr Wang its Chief AI Officer. Weeks later, the company brought in Shengjia Zhao - a key contributor to the development of Open AI's GPT-4 - naming him Chief AI Scientist for the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs division. At the same time, some of the senior FAIR directors were laid off when Meta cut 600 Jobs at Superintelligence Labs. It seems somewhere within Meta's new direction, LeCun opted out, perhaps related to his belief that large language models, LLMs, are not the future of superintelligence. Nonetheless, he said Meta will partner with his new startup, where he will focus on creating advanced machine intelligence. He believes that for AI to become superintelligent, it must understand the natural world, whereas LLMs only understand as much as the data they are trained on. "I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program, AMI, I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond," he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." He added that his startup will have "far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta's commercial interests, but many of which do not."

Yann LeCun Confirms Leaving Meta to Launch Advanced Machine Intelligence | AIM

Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has announced that he will leave the company at the end of the year to start a new venture focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a research program he has been developing over the past several years. "In planning to leave Meta after 12 years, I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program," LeCun said in a post on Facebook. LeCun, who served five years as the founding director of FAIR (Facebook AI Research) and seven years as chief AI scientist, said the new company aims to build AI systems "that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." He described the creation of FAIR as his "proudest non-technical accomplishment," adding that its impact on Meta, the AI field and the broader tech ecosystem has been spectacular. Meta will remain a partner in the new company. LeCun said he is extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox and Mike Schroepfer for supporting FAIR and the AMI program. "Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company," he said. LeCun said the AMI initiative will have applications across multiple sectors, some intersecting with Meta's business and others outside it. He noted that pursuing AMI independently would "maximise its broad impact." Further details about the startup will be announced later, he said, while confirming he will remain at Meta until the end of the year.

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to leave Meta and start new AI research company

NEW YORK (AP) -- Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year. LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can "understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." His announcement, after more than a week of rumors, comes after Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 600 AI jobs this fall. LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlap with Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not. LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta's AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research. LeCun stepped down as the group's director in 2018 but has remained Meta's chief AI scientist. He's also a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. LeCun spent his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could "read" text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to leave Meta and start new AI research company

NEW YORK -- Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year. LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can "understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." His announcement, after more than a week of rumors, comes after Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 600 AI jobs this fall. LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlap with Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not. LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta's AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research. LeCun stepped down as the group's director in 2018 but has remained Meta's chief AI scientist. He's also a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. LeCun spent his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could "read" text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Yann LeCun to Leave Meta, Launch AI Startup Focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence

(Reuters) -Yann LeCun, one of the founding figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at Meta Platforms, said on Wednesday he plans to leave the company at the end of the year to launch a new AI startup. LeCun has been a key part of Meta's artificial intelligence ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders. Over 12 years, he served five as FAIR's founding director and seven as the company's chief AI scientist, guiding breakthroughs in deep learning, computer vision and large-scale language modeling that underpin products like Instagram recommendations and Meta's generative AI systems. He developed an early form of an artificial neural network that mimicked how the human eye and brain process images -- technology that later became the backbone of modern image recognition and GenAI. LeCun, 65, said his new venture will pursue Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research -- a project he has developed in collaboration with colleagues at FAIR and New York University, where he teaches. The computer scientist said he will provide more details on his new firm at a later date, but added that Meta will be a partner in the venture, reflecting what he called the company's "continued interest and support" for AMI's long-term goals. "The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment," he wrote. "The impact of FAIR on Meta, the AI field, and the wider world has been spectacular." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth have both credited LeCun with laying the foundations for Meta's current AI infrastructure, including its open-source Llama models that have become a cornerstone of the global AI research community. LeCun is widely regarded as one of the "godfathers" of deep learning, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio -- a trio that won the 2018 Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun exits to start new AI research company - The Economic Times

LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlwith Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not.Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year. LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can "understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." His announcement, after more than a week of rumors, comes after Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 600 AI jobs this fall. LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlwith Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not. Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta's AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research, which has often worked to advance computer science research that's not directly tied to immediate commercial products. LeCun stepped down as the group's director in 2018 but has remained Meta's chief AI scientist. His departure reflects a shift since Meta in June made a $14.3 billion investment in AI data company Scale and recruited its CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead a team developing "superintelligence" at the tech giant. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing to revive commercial AI efforts as the company faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. LeCun has long expressed public skepticism about the sophistication of large language models behind chatbots like ChatGPT, saying that they are useful but doubting that they will be a path to the better-than-human AI that other tech leaders have promised. He has also been a strong advocate for open-source AI systems that, like Meta's own large language model, Llama, make their key components publicly accessible in a way that some AI safety advocates deem too risky. LeCun is also a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. LeCun studied in his native France and later Canada before spending his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could "read" text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun to Leave Meta and Start New AI Research Company

NEW YORK (AP) -- Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year. LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can "understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences." His announcement, after more than a week of rumors, comes after Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 600 AI jobs this fall. LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlap with Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not. LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta's AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research. LeCun stepped down as the group's director in 2018 but has remained Meta's chief AI scientist. He's also a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. LeCun spent his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could "read" text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun announces departure to start his own firm (META:NASDAQ)

Meta's (META) chief AI scientist and the founding director of the FAIR lab, Yann LeCun, is leaving the company at the end of 2025, according to an official memo posted on his LinkedIn account late on Wednesday. LeCun, who has been LeCun's exit signals a shift away from longer-term, fundamental AI research at Meta, potentially slowing innovation in advanced AI concepts within the company. Meta's focus on deploying AI models and products to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic may improve market responsiveness but could undermine foundational research. Frequent C-suite departures and a pivot to a new 'superintelligence' division may improve short-term competitiveness but risk strategic disruption and talent loss.

Yann LeCun Resigns from Meta to Start Next-Gen Humanoid AI Venture

Yann LeCun to Stay Partnered with Meta While Launching Startup Focused on Advanced Human-Like AI Yann LeCun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, has officially resigned after 12 years at the company. He shared the news in a long Facebook post, saying he plans to start a new . His new startup will focus on building advanced AI systems that can understand the physical world, plan complex actions, and think like humans. LeCun called this "the next big revolution in AI." LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Facebook AI Research (FAIR). FAIR became one of the world's under his leadership. He helped develop convolutional neural networks, which became the foundation for modern AI and computer vision. Even after stepping down as FAIR's director in 2018, he stayed at Meta as Chief AI Scientist.

Yann LeCun to Leave Meta Platforms as Chief AI Scientist at the End of the Year 2025

Meta Platforms announced that Yann LeCun, Vice President & Chief AI Scientist, one of the founding figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at the company opens new tab and he plans to leave the company at the end of the year 2025 to launch a new AI startup. LeCun has been a key part of Meta's artificial intelligence ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders. Over 12 years, he served five as FAIR's founding director and seven as the company's chief AI scientist, guiding breakthroughs in deep learning, computer vision and large-scale language modeling that underpin products like Instagram recommendations and Meta's generative AI systems. He developed an early form of an artificial neural network that mimicked how the human eye and brain process images ? technology that later became the backbone of modern image recognition and GenAI. LeCun, 65, said his new venture will pursue Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research ? a project he has developed in collaboration with colleagues at FAIR and New York University, where he teaches.

Yann LeCun to leave Meta, launch AI startup focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence

(Reuters) -Yann LeCun, one of the founding figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at Meta Platforms, said on Wednesday he plans to leave the company at the end of the year to launch a new AI startup. LeCun has been a key part of Meta's artificial intelligence ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders. Over 12 years, he served five as FAIR's founding director and seven as the company's chief AI scientist, guiding breakthroughs in deep learning, computer vision and large-scale language modeling that underpin products like Instagram recommendations and Meta's generative AI systems. He developed an early form of an artificial neural network that mimicked how the human eye and brain process images -- technology that later became the backbone of modern image recognition and GenAI. LeCun, 65, said his new venture will pursue Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research -- a project he has developed in collaboration with colleagues at FAIR and New York University, where he teaches. The computer scientist said he will provide more details on his new firm at a later date, but added that Meta will be a partner in the venture, reflecting what he called the company's "continued interest and support" for AMI's long-term goals. "The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment," he wrote. "The impact of FAIR on Meta, the AI field, and the wider world has been spectacular." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth have both credited LeCun with laying the foundations for Meta's current AI infrastructure, including its open-source Llama models that have become a cornerstone of the global AI research community. LeCun is widely regarded as one of the "godfathers" of deep learning, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio -- a trio that won the 2018 Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)

Yann LeCun leaving Meta: AI expert's next project is extremely ambitious

Yann LeCun plans bold AI venture aiming beyond today's large language models When one of the most influential minds in artificial intelligence steps away from a tech giant, the move is never quiet. Yann LeCun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist and one of the three "godfathers of deep learning," is preparing to leave the company at the end of 2025. For more than a decade, LeCun shaped Meta's research culture, built the FAIR lab into a respected global institution, and helped cement the company's reputation as a serious AI powerhouse. His exit is more than a change in leadership, It is a shift in the long-term direction of AI research itself. Also read: Inside Snapdragon X2 Elite's Oryon: The CPU challenging Intel, AMD and Apple LeCun's entry into Meta began in 2013, when he joined the company - then still Facebook - to build an ambitious research division focused on advancing foundational AI. FAIR was designed to operate like an academic lab inside a technology company, free from the constant pressure of product deadlines. That environment helped Meta produce breakthroughs in machine learning that influenced the entire industry. But over the last few years, Meta has transformed. With the explosive rise of generative AI, the company has pivoted sharply toward rapid product development and massive consumer-scale deployments. Everything now moves faster, from model training to feature rollouts, as the company competes with OpenAI, Google, and others. LeCun's approach to AI, however, has always been rooted in long-horizon research. As Meta accelerated toward short-cycle development, a natural tension grew between the company's priorities and his own. According to reporting from Bloomberg and Reuters, that divergence is one of the reasons LeCun decided to step outside Meta and pursue his vision independently. Yet the move is not a hostile departure. Meta is expected to partner with the new venture, an unusual but significant detail that suggests both sides still benefit from staying close. Meta gains access to long-term innovation without slowing its own pace, and LeCun gains freedom from corporate timelines while maintaining a valuable ally. Also read: Gemini 3 vs Gemini 2.5: A Complete Breakdown of Google's Next-Gen Upgrade At the core of his new startup is a concept he calls Advanced Machine Intelligence. While today's AI world is dominated by large language models that generate text and mimic conversation, LeCun is focused on something far more fundamental. He wants to build AI systems that can understand the physical world, form internal representations of reality, learn continuously from experience, and plan complex actions. In his view, current AI, however impressive, lacks true reasoning and grounding. It operates on patterns, not understanding. LeCun has spent years arguing that the future of AI lies in giving machines the ability to predict, navigate, and adapt, much like animals or humans. His new venture is designed to pursue that vision without compromise. If successful, it would move the field beyond the constraints of language-first systems and toward a form of intelligence capable of real-world autonomy. LeCun's departure from Meta represents a broader shift taking shape across the AI landscape. The field is increasingly split between companies chasing fast, productised AI and researchers pushing toward deeper scientific breakthroughs. His exit reinforces the idea that the next major leaps may come from smaller, focused labs rather than corporate giants optimising for quarterly goals. With Meta remaining a close partner and LeCun free to pursue a more ambitious scientific agenda, his new company instantly becomes one of the most anticipated ventures in the AI world. The industry now waits to see whether his vision of Advanced Machine Intelligence can push the field beyond its current limits.

Meta's chief AI scientist quits after 12 years, here's why

His startup will focus on creating AI systems that can truly understand the physical world. Meta is yet again facing a major leadership shakeup, with chief AI scientist Yann LeCun stepping down after nearly 12 years with the company. LeCun announced his exit through a series of posts on Threads, revealing plans to launch his own AI startup. LeCun joined Meta in 2013 and spent five years as the founding director of the company's Fundamental AI Research lab. He later became chief AI scientist, a position he held for seven years. So why is he leaving now? LeCun is creating a startup company which he claims would "continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond." Also read: Xiaomi 14 Civi price drops by over Rs 16,700 on Amazon: Check deal details here His startup will focus on creating AI systems that can truly understand the physical world. "The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences," LeCun explained. Despite the departure, Meta will remain involved in LeCun's new venture. "Meta will be a partner of the new company," he stated, noting that while some applications of AMI align with Meta's business interests, many do not. He believes operating independently will allow the technology to have a broader impact across different sectors. Also read: Google Pixel 10 price drops by over Rs 15,900 on Amazon: How to grab this deal LeCun plans to stay with Meta through the end of 2025 before fully transitioning to his startup. "I will give some more details about the new company when the time comes," LeCun said, keeping further specifics under wraps for now.