Meta Platforms Inc. Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is leaving the company to launch his own startup, according to the Financial Times.
A Turing Award winner who worked under “the Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, in the 1980s, LeCun (pictured) is one of the leading figures in artificial intelligence. After moving from France to the U.S., he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he pioneered research in machine learning. He joined Meta to work on its advanced AI lab, FAIR, and became the company’s chief AI scientist in 2013.
LeCun previously reported to Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. However, after the company’s recent restructuring, he now reports directly to Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta’s new superintelligence division. Wang joined the company earlier this year following Meta’s $14 billion investment in his data-labeling startup, Scale AI.
According to some reports, Wang’s personality didn’t receive everyone’s approval. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg recently bucked a trend by not hiring employees with AI experience, but laying off 600 of them. His shakeup is an effort to make Meta more competitive with OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC and Google LLC.
Reports suggest that LeCun may have become frustrated at the chaotic environment. Some of the AI researchers Meta brought in lasted just months, with three reported to have left the building no sooner than they filled their desks with family photos.
According to the Financial Times report, LeCunn’s next venture will be centered around creating “new world” models of AI, systems that imagine how the world works and can predict what will happen in future scenarios, bringing AI closer to human-like reasoning than pattern recognition. This is touted as the next step in the AI revolution, with LeCun previously stating that large language models are not the way to achieve artificial superintelligence.
“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,” he wrote on X last year, explaining that the road to superintelligence is a long one.
Photo: Flickr
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