Turing Award Winner Yann LeCun Quits Meta, Seeks Funding for New AI Venture

In a significant development, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist and a Turing Award winner, is planning to leave the social media giant in the coming months to found his own startup. This move comes as Meta's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, seeks to radically overhaul the company's AI operations.

LeCun, who has headed Meta's Fundamental AI Research Lab (Fair) since 2013, is now reporting to Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder of data-labeling startup Scale AI, whom Zuckerberg hired to lead a new "superintelligence" team at Meta. This shift in leadership reflects Zuckerberg's pivot away from the longer-term research work of Fair to focus on more rapidly rolling out AI models and products, as he believes Meta has fallen behind the competition.

Within Meta, Zuckerberg has also personally handpicked an exclusive team, called TBD Lab, to propel the development of the next iteration of its large language models, luring staff from rivals such as OpenAI and Google with lucrative pay packages.

LeCun, however, has long argued that the large language models that Zuckerberg has prioritized are "useful" but will never be able to reason and plan like humans. Instead, he has focused on developing an entirely new generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human-level intelligence, known as "world models."

As LeCun prepares to depart, Meta's AI strategy continues to evolve, with the company facing pressure from Wall Street to show that its multibillion-dollar investment in becoming an "AI leader" will pay off and boost revenue.