Yann LeCun confirms long-rumoured departure from Meta, is now launching own AI startup

Yann LeCun has confirmed he is leaving Meta to launch his own AI startup. Considered one of the godfathers of modern AI, the 65-year-old confirmed his long-rumoured departure in a LinkedIn post.

“As many of you have heard through rumors 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,” LeCun announced.

Yann LeCun had joined Meta in 2013 as the founding director of FAIR (Facebook AI Research).

AI changes at Meta

Rumours about Yann LeCun leaving Meta had been circulating for some time, and they were rooted in both company changes and differences in vision. Meta recently reorganised its AI teams to focus more on products and commercial projects. A new division called “Superintelligence Labs,” led by Alexandr Wang, was created.

As a result, LeCun, who had previously reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, began reporting to 28-year-old Wang. Moreover, when Meta laid off 600 employees in October, many of those affected were from FAIR – the department that YeCun had helped set up. (Also read: Anger bubbles as Meta lays off 600 from its AI division: ‘The billionaire forgets…’)

Many-therefore saw the creation of Superintelligence Labs as a change that reduced the importance and independence that LeCun once enjoyed at Meta as its chief AI scientist.

LeCun has long had different ideas about the future of AI. While many companies, including Meta, are investing heavily in large language models, he believes these models alone are not enough to create truly intelligent systems.

LeCun’s own research interests were also seen as being at odds with Meta’s corporate goals.

Yann LeCun’s new AI startup

LeCun’s new startup will focus on what he calls Advanced Machine Intelligence — AI systems that can plan, reason and understand the real world.

“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 said in his LinkedIn post.

“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, and the 65-year-old 2019 Turing Award winner said he was grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR.