Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own start-up
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Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social media giant to found his own start-up, as Mark Zuckerberg seeks to radically overhaul the company’s AI operations.
LeCun, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the pioneers of modern AI, has told associates he will leave the Silicon Valley group in the coming months, according to people familiar with the conversations.
The French-US scientist is also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture, one of the people said. LeCun declined to comment. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The impending departure comes as Meta’s founder shakes up its AI strategy in order to challenge rivals such as OpenAI and Google in developing more powerful forms of AI.
Zuckerberg has pivoted away from the longer-term research work of Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab (Fair), which LeCun has headed since 2013, to focus on more rapidly rolling out models and AI products after deciding that Meta had fallen behind the competition.
Over the summer, Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang to lead a new “superintelligence” team at Meta, paying $14.3bn to hire the 28-year-old founder of data-labelling start-up Scale AI and acquire a 49 per cent interest in his company.
Within those wider AI efforts, Zuckerberg also personally handpicked an exclusive team, called TBD Lab, to propel development of the next iteration of its large language models, luring staff from rivals such as OpenAI and Google with $100mn pay packages.
As a result, LeCun, who had previously reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang.
Zuckerberg’s pivot followed the botched release of Meta’s most recent Llama 4 model, which performed worse than the most advanced offerings from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, while its Meta AI chatbot has failed to gain traction with consumers.
LeCun, however, has long argued that the LLMs that Zuckerberg has put at the centre of his strategy are “useful” but will never be able to reason and plan like humans, increasingly appearing at odds with his boss’s AI vision.
Within Fair, LeCun has instead focused on developing an entirely new generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human-level intelligence, known as “world models”.
These systems aim to understand the physical world by learning from videos and spatial data rather than just language, though LeCun has said it could take a decade to fully develop the architecture.
LeCun’s next endeavour is focused on furthering his work on world models, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Zuckerberg has come under growing pressure from Wall Street to show that his multibillion-dollar investment in becoming an “AI leader” will pay off and boost revenue.
Meta’s shares plunged 12.6 per cent — wiping out almost $240bn from its valuation — in late October after the chief executive signalled higher AI spending ahead, which could top $100bn next year.
LeCun’s departure marks the latest in a string of exits and leadership and organisational reshuffles at Meta in what has been a tumultuous year for the $1.6tn company.
In May, vice-president of AI research Joelle Pineau left and recently joined Canadian AI start-up Cohere. Last month, the company also laid off about 600 people from its AI research unit in a bid to cut costs, eliminate bureaucracy and release products more quickly.
Zuckerberg has also brought in new AI leaders on high salaries of hundreds of millions of dollars, irking some of the old guard. In July, Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, was hired as the chief scientist of Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.
Additional reporting by George Hammond in San Francisco
