AI godfather calls Meta AI boss Alexander Wang ‘inexperienced’
Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta Platforms, at the VivaTech conference in Paris on May 22, 2024.
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Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann Lecun described the 29-year-old AI boss as “inexperienced” and warned of an exodus of staff from the company.
Alexander Wang, the billionaire co-founder of Scale AI, joined Meta as chief AI officer in 2025 after the tech giant acquired a 49% stake in his startup.
His hiring comes amid an intensifying AI talent war; Meta is reportedly offering a $100 million signing bonus to snatch up top talent from ChatGPT maker OpenAI as it races with other hyperscalers to dominate the multibillion-dollar AI market with cutting-edge models.
Lecun, known as one of the “fathers of artificial intelligence” and who left Meta in November, called Wang “young” and “inexperienced.” Finance Times.
“He’s a fast learner, he knows what he doesn’t know,” Lecun said of Wang, who heads Meta’s new AI research unit, TBD Labs, and is tasked with creating new AI models. But Lecun added: “There is no experience with research, no knowledge of how you apply research, how you do it, or what might be attractive or unattractive to a researcher.”
Lecun, 65, added that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “fundamentally lost trust in everyone involved” after the company was accused of using gaming benchmarks to make the Llama 4 model look more impressive. Lecun said Zuckerberg “basically sidelined the entire AI organization.”
“A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t left yet will also leave,” Lecun added.
“We had a lot of new ideas and really cool things that we needed to implement. But they were just going after things that were essentially safe and proven,” he said. “When you do that, you get left behind.”
CNBC contacted Meta for a response but did not receive a response as of the time this story went live.
AI superintelligence a ‘dead end’ for graduate students
When asked about Meta’s AI hiring push, Lecun said: “The future will tell whether this is a good idea.”
But he added that “the Master’s is basically a dead end when it comes to superintelligence.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of people in Meta, including Alex, who want me not to tell the world about this,” Lecun said.
Lecun’s new venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, focuses on “world models”: artificial intelligence systems that learn from videos and physical data as well as language.
Nabla, a healthtech AI startup that partnered with Lecun’s company in December, said in a statement: Press release Unlike world models, Masters “still face some structural constraints that make autonomous decision-making difficult, including hallucinations, non-deterministic reasoning, and limited processing of continuous multimodal data.”
