Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Reportedly Planning Exit to Become a Startup Founder

Meta could reportedly lose a valuable artificial intelligence (AI) talent soon. As per the report, the company's Vice President and Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, is planning to take an exit in the coming months. The Turing Award winner and one of the three godfathers of AI is said to be leaving to launch his own startup. The Menlo Park-headquartered tech giant's shift in focus on AI and growing differences between him and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have reportedly also contributed to the decision.

Yann LeCun Could Soon Leave Meta

According to the Financial Times, LeCun is all set to part ways with the parent company of Facebook. Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the publication claimed that he has told his coworkers about his plans to leave Meta in the coming months. The Turing Award winner has reportedly also held early discussions with investors to raise funds for a new venture, which hints that his next goal might be launching a startup.

LeCun's reported departure is not the first such instance. Meta has been losing its AI talent in recent months. A report in August claimed that at least eight employees working in the AI division had announced their exit. Interestingly, most of these departures were from long-serving employees and not those who recently joined the Superintelligence team.

The report claims that in recent times, Zuckerberg moved the company's focus from its Fundamental AI Research Lab (Fair), which was headed by LeCun since 2013. Instead, he reportedly favoured rapidly building artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence, and created the Superintelligence team, which was led by the former Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

Due to this shift in focus and restructuring of hierarchy, LeCun, who reported directly to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, is said to be reporting to Wang at present. The report also claims that Zuckerberg and LeCun disagreed with each other on their views on AI. It is difficult to ascertain whether any of these reasons played a role in the Turing Award winner's purported exit.

It is said that after Meta, LeCun's next destination would be launching a startup and developing world models, or AI systems that understand and predict how the world works. Instead of merely reacting to inputs, an AI with a world model can simulate future scenarios, reason about cause and effect, and anticipate the outcomes of actions. World models are increasingly seen as a foundation for more capable AI systems, enabling them to move beyond pattern matching towards genuine reasoning and long-horizon decision-making.