Meta has rejigged its AI division in recent months, and it appears to have meant the departure of its Chief AI Scientist.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist who’d joined the company in 2013, is leaving to launch his own startup, FT reports. LeCun has reportedly told associates that he intends to depart in the coming months. He is also also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture. Both Yann LeCun and Meta didn’t comment on FT’s report.
Yann LeCun had joined Meta (then Facebook) in December 2013. He became the first director of the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) division. FAIR made a name for itself in AI and ML research, releasing Pytorch, which has become the de-facto standard for AI programming. More recently, FAIR released popular models such as SAM (Segment Anything Model) and the Llama series of models, which kick-started the open-weights AI revolution.
But Meta’s AI efforts were seen to be lagging in recent years. Llama 4 was widely seen to be a failure, and the space it vacated was quickly taken over by Chinese AI companies. Meta had looked to put its AI ambitions back on track by acquiring 49% of Scale AI for $14 billion and placing its founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang at the head of its AI efforts. Wang had initially managed to snag several top researchers from rival labs like OpenAI at some eye-popping salaries, but has largely failed to release a breakthrough product so far. Meta had most recently laid off 600 AI researchers from its FAIR lab. Several big names have also left, including Pytorch creator Soumith Chintala, who’d said he was leaving Meta just last week.
In this context, it makes sense that Yann LeCun wants to leave as well. 28-year-old Alexandr Wang is currently calling the shots at its AI division, and much of LeCun’s team has left or been fired. LeCun himself has expressed skepticism in recent times about whether LLMs can be scaled to achieve human-level intelligence. Meta, being so far behind in the AI game, might be in no mood to give him a long rope for pursuing such research which could take years to fructify. In addition, Chief Scientists at other labs have done quite well with their own startups — OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever has seen the valuation of his startup, SSI, zoom to $32 billion without releasing a product. And while LeCun might be leaving for greener pastures, it would be a loss for Meta — LeCun is a Turing award winner and considered one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, and his departure would mean that Meta would’ve lost the tallest AI leader from its ranks.