Yann LeCun, known as one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence and one of the first AI visionaries to join the company then known as Facebook, is leaving Meta.
LuCun said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that he plans to create a startup that specializes in a kind of AI technology that researchers have described as world models, analyzing information beyond web data in order to better represent the physical world and its properties.
“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,” LeCun wrote. “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.
The departure comes at a time of disarray within Meta’s AI unit, which was dramatically overhauled this year after the company released the fourth version of its Llama open-source large language model to a disappointing response from developers. That spurred CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spend billions of dollars recruiting top AI talent, including a June $14.5 billion investment in Scale AI to lure the startup’s 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang, now Meta’s new chief AI officer.
LeCun, 65, joined Facebook in 2013 to be director of the FAIR AI research division while maintaining a part-time professorial position at New York University. He said in the LinkedIn post that the “creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment.”
“I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of the AMI program over the last few years,” LeCun said. “Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company.”
At the time, Facebook and Google were heavily recruiting high-level academics like LeCun to spearhead their efforts to produce cutting-edge computer science research that could potentially benefit their core businesses and products.
LeCun, along with other AI luminaries like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, centered their academic research on a kind of AI technique known as deep learning, which involves the training of enormous software systems called neural networks so they can discover patterns within reams of data. The researchers helped popularize the deep learning approach, and in 2019 won the prestigious Turing Award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Since then, LeCun’s approach to AI development has drifted from the direction taken by Meta and the rest of Silicon Valley.
Meta and other tech companies like OpenAI have spent billions of dollars in developing so-called foundation models, particularly LLMs, as part of their efforts to advance state-of-the-art computing. However, LeCun and other deep-learning experts, have said that these current AI models, while powerful, have a limited understanding of the world, and new computing architectures are needed for researchers to create software that’s on par with or surpasses humans on certain tasks, a notion known as artificial general intelligence.
“As I envision it, AMI will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not,” LeCun said in the post. “Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact.”
Besides Wang, other recent notables that Zuckerberg brought in to revamp Meta’s AI unit include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who heads the unit’s product team, and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, the group’s chief scientist.
In October, Meta laid off 600 employees from its Superintelligence Labs division, including some who were part of the FAIR unit that LeCun helped get off the ground. Those layoffs and other cuts to FAIR over the years, coupled with a new AI leadership team, played a major role in LeCun’s decision to leave, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Additionally, LeCun rarely interacted with Wang nor TBD Labs unit, which is compromised of many of the headline-grabbing hires Zuckerberg made over the summer. TBD Labs oversees the development of Meta’s Llama AI models, which were originally developed within FAIR, the people said.
While LeCun was always a champion of sharing AI research and related technologies to the open-source community, Wang and his team favor a more closed approach amid intense competition from rivals like OpenAI and Google, the people said.
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