Long-time Chief AI Scientist of Meta, Yann LeCun, is preparing to leave the company to establish his own artificial intelligence startup.
This is one of the first big exits since Mark Zuckerberg reorganised Meta’s AI division under Superintelligence Labs.
LeCun, a Turing Award laureate and one of the pioneers of deep learning, is reportedly in early discussions with investors to raise funds for his new venture, which will centre on developing “world models”, AI systems designed to simulate and understand the real world more deeply.
This approach aims to create machines that can learn and reason with a closer resemblance to human cognition.
His departure comes at a time when Meta is enhancing its drive to compete with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in the superintelligent systems space.
Mark Zuckerberg recently consolidated Meta’s AI research under Superintelligence Labs, placing Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labelling firm Scale AI, in charge of the division.
This reorganisation meant that LeCun, who had long reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, was reassigned to report directly to Wang, a move that, according to sources cited by the Financial Times, may have influenced his decision to leave.
LeCun’s planned exit reveals both a generational change in leadership and a potential divergence in vision between academic research and the dynamic, product-driven approach of Meta AI.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has yet to comment publicly on the reports. LeCun, too, has not issued an official statement.
Since joining Meta (then Facebook) in 2013, Yann LeCun has helped in promoting convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and self-supervised learning, two techniques that underpin today’s large-scale AI systems.
His next startup could represent a return to the more exploratory and research-oriented roots that first defined his career.
