Meta Will Lose Its Godfather of AI at the End of the Year

Meta's Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist, Yann LeCun, confirmed his plans to depart on Wednesday. The Turing Award winner and one of the three godfathers of AI said he is leaving the company to create his own startup and continue the research on AI systems that understand the physical world. The move comes at a time when the Menlo Park-based tech giant is aggressively investing in its Superintelligence Labs and chasing artificial general intelligence (AGI). LeCun said he will not exit before the end of the current year.

Yann LeCun to Leave Meta

In a post on Threads, LeCun said, “As many of you have heard through rumours 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.” In subsequent posts, he also thanked Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support.

Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division was the brainchild of LeCun and was established to advance open, foundational research in AI across areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, self-supervised learning, and robotics. Over the years, FAIR has published influential work in multiple domains, including research related to world-model-style systems and robotics. The team has also been central to the development of Meta's large language models. Even the original LLaMA models were created and released by researchers within Meta's AI research organisation, of which FAIR is a core part.

However, over the years, the company's focus has shifted towards researching and reaching superintelligence, and building consumer and enterprise-focused generative AI models. This new vision was likely the reason behind the creation of the Superintelligence Labs, which is headed by Alexandr Wang.

It cannot be said for sure that this was the reason behind LeCun's planned exit. LeCun, in a separate post, said that he was leaving to create his own startup that will continue the research on Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI). He also said, “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.”

Interestingly, due to this overlap, Meta will also be a partner of LeCun's envisioned startup, the Turing Award winner said.