'Young and inexperienced': Why Yann LeCun left Meta
Yann LeCun, Meta's former Chief AI Scientist, recently shared why he left the company in late 2025.
He said he felt uneasy reporting to Alexandr Wang—calling him "young and inexperienced"—after Wang took over Meta's Superintelligence projects following Meta's purchase of a large stake in Scale AI, reported at roughly $14-15 billion.
Creative clashes over Llama 4 and AI direction
LeCun also butted heads with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, especially after Llama 4 struggled with benchmarks.
While LeCun once had total freedom for open research at Meta, Zuckerberg later pushed hard for rapid progress on large language models—a path LeCun sees as a "dead end" for superintelligence.
He believes world models are the way forward.
What's next for LeCun—and his open-source vision
Now leading Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, LeCun is aiming to build smarter AI that actually understands the real world—with hopes of hitting a $3 billion valuation.
He previously insisted that Llama be open source and free.