Confirmed: Yann LeCun leaves Meta

Following rumors, he is now confirming it himself: Yann LeCun is leaving Meta at the end of the year to found a startup. The Turing Award winner is one of the most recognized AI experts. With him, Meta loses knowledge and prestige.

LeCun wants to build a startup that develops Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI). He writes this on Threads. LeCun also worked on this at Meta. It is the next stage of the AI revolution. An AMI should be able to understand the physical world, have a persistent memory, and be able to reason, as well as plan complex sequences of actions. It is initially unclear whether other scientists from his team will go with him. LeCun was previously Chief Scientist in the Paris FAIR team at Meta – FAIR stands for Fundamental AI Research. As the name suggests, this has always been more about fundamental research than applicable AI products, which Meta develops in Silicon Valley. In Paris, for example, work is being done to recognize entire sentences from brain activity. In addition, a robot dog roams the offices, learning to help with tasks like tidying up. However, the PyTorch programming library and the first versions of Llama were also developed by the team.

On Threads, LeCun writes that he is extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders for supporting FAIR and thus the development of an AMI in recent years. Meta will therefore also be a partner of the new startup. "In my view, AMI will have far-reaching application possibilities in many economic sectors, some of which align with Meta's commercial interests, but many will not." Therefore, it is important to pursue the goal in an independent institution. Further details about the startup are to follow.

LeCun's clear words about the AI race in Silicon Valley and what he believes is a false expectation of what generative AI can achieve have also contributed to his reputation. It was good for Meta to be able to call him Chief Scientist.

Even before that, LeCun had also taught part-time at New York University. The position seems unaffected by his plans. In addition to the Turing Award, arguably the highest award in computer science, LeCun also recently received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering – a British award for engineering achievements.

Several months ago, Joëlle Pineau also left the FAIR team. She was Vice President of AI Research at Meta and a founding member of the Meta FAIR team.

(emw)