Meta’s Chief AI Scientist is leaving the company after 12 years

Yann LeCun, one of Meta’s top AI researchers, has announced that he is leaving the company after 12 years to found his own AI startup. LeCun, 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 “will continue the advanced machine intelligence (AMI) research program that I have been pursuing over the past several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond” and that it will partner with Meta. “The goal of the startup is to create the next big revolution in artificial intelligence: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can think, and can plan complex action sequences,” he wrote in an update on Threads. “AMI will have far-reaching applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s business interests, but many of which do not. Pursuing AMI’s goal in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact.”

Speculation about LeCun’s future in the Meta has increased in recent months. Earlier this year, the company invested nearly $15 billion in Scale AI and named 28-year-old CEO Alexander Wang as chief AI officer. Meta has also recruited Shengjia Zhao, who helped create GPT-4, making him chief AI scientist at Meta’s newly created Superintelligence Labs unit.

LeCun, on the other hand, has been openly skeptical of LLMs. “We’re not going to get to the level of AI by just scaling up master’s degrees in law,” he said during an appearance on a Big Tech podcast earlier this year. In a recent conference talk, he advised aspiring scholars to “never work on an MBA,” according to comments reported by LLM Magazine. The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Meta has reshaped its AI teams. The company cut “several hundred” jobs from its Superintelligence group, including FAIR, last month. LeCun has had “difficulty obtaining the necessary resources for his Meta projects as the company has focused more on building models to compete with direct threats from competitors including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and Anthropic.” Bloomberg I mentioned.

LeCun said he will remain in Meta until the end of the year. “I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), Chris Cox, and Mike Schrofer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of the AMI program over the past few years,” he wrote.