AI pioneer Yann LeCun to leave Meta, start new venture
What's the story
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief artificial intelligence (AI) scientist and a Turing Award-winning AI pioneer, is reportedly planning to leave the company. According to the Financial Times, he intends to launch his own start-up in the coming months and is in talks to secure funding for this new venture. LeCun is said to be focusing on world models for his start-up. These are AI systems that build an internal representation of their environment to simulate cause-and-effect relationships and predict outcomes.
Organizational shifts
Meta restructuring AI team, hiring from rival companies
LeCun's departure comes as Meta is also rethinking its AI strategy in light of competition from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The company has spent billions of dollar to hire over 50 engineers and researchers from rival companies to form a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). In June, the tech giant also invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling vendor Scale AI and appointed its CEO Alexandr Wang as head of this new division.
Research impact
Shift in focus at Meta
LeCun's long-term research work at Meta has been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decisions to overhaul things after the company's previous family of AI models, Llama 4, failed to keep up with rival models. Unlike MSL, LeCun-led Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR) is designed to focus on long-term AI research—techniques that may be used five to 10 years from now.
Technology concerns
LeCun skeptical about AI technology and its solutions
LeCun has been openly skeptical about how AI technology, especially large language models (LLMs), is being marketed as a solution to all of humanity's problems. He even tweeted that AI systems have a long way to go. "It seems to me that before 'urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us' we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat," he wrote.