AI Pioneer Yann LeCun Leaves Meta After 12 Years to Launch Independent 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.

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

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 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.

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)