Summary: Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist and a Turing Award winner, is reportedly planning to leave the company to start his own AI-focused startup. His new venture will continue his work on world models, a cutting-edge area in AI research. This move comes amid significant changes and challenges within Meta’s AI divisions as the company adapts to fierce competition in the AI space.
Yann LeCun’s Departure from Meta
Meta may soon lose one of its most prominent AI leaders. Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, senior researcher at Meta, and recipient of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, is planning to leave the company in the coming months. According to the Financial Times, LeCun is already in discussions to raise capital for a startup focused on advancing his research on world models.
What Are World Models?
World models are AI systems that develop an internal understanding of their environment, allowing them to simulate cause-and-effect scenarios and predict outcomes. This approach is gaining traction among leading AI labs and startups, including Google DeepMind and World Labs, as a promising path toward more sophisticated AI capabilities.
Meta’s Shifting AI Strategy
LeCun’s departure comes at a critical time for Meta, which has recently revamped its AI development strategy. The company has hired over 50 engineers and researchers from competitors to build a new AI unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling company Scale AI and appointed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead MSL.
Challenges Within Meta’s AI Teams
These changes have reportedly created some chaos within Meta’s AI divisions. New hires have expressed frustration with navigating the bureaucracy of a large corporation, while the scope of Meta’s previous generative AI team has been reduced. Meanwhile, LeCun’s long-term research group, the Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR), which focuses on AI techniques that may be relevant five to ten years from now, has been overshadowed by the company’s shift toward more immediate AI applications.
LeCun’s Perspective on AI Progress
LeCun has been openly skeptical about the current hype surrounding AI, especially large language models (LLMs). He has cautioned against viewing AI as an immediate solution to all problems, emphasizing that AI systems still have a long way to go. In a recent tweet, he remarked, “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat.”
Meta has not yet responded to requests for comment outside regular business hours.