Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is leaving the company
Yann LeCun, known as one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence and one of the first AI visionaries to join the company then known as Facebook, is leaving Meta.
LuCun said: LinkedIn post He said Wednesday he plans to launch a startup that specializes in a type of artificial intelligence technology that researchers describe as world models, which analyze information beyond web data to better represent the physical world and its properties.
“I am starting a new company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) that I have been leading for the past several years with colleagues at FAIR, NYU, and elsewhere,” LeCun wrote. “The initiative’s goal is to realize the next big revolution in artificial intelligence: systems that understand the physical world, have permanent memory, can reason and plan complex sequences of actions.”
Meta will partner with LeCun’s initiative.
The departure comes at a time of turmoil within Meta’s AI unit; This was significantly overhauled this year after the company released the fourth version of its Llama open source large language model following a disappointing response from developers. That has spurred CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spend billions of dollars recruiting top AI talent, including a $14.5 billion investment in Scale AI in June to attract the startup’s 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang, who is now Meta’s new AI chief.
LeCun, 65, joined Facebook in 2013 to lead FAIR AI research while holding a part-time professorship at New York University. “The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical achievement,” he said in his LinkedIn post.
“I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR and the AMI program over the past several years,” LeCun said. “Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will become a partner of the new company.”
At that time Facebook and Google They were heavily recruiting top academics like LeCun to lead efforts to produce cutting-edge computer science research that could potentially benefit their core business and products.
LeCun, along with other AI luminaries such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, have focused their academic research on a type of artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning, which involves training massive software systems called neural networks so they can discover patterns within chunks of data. Researchers helped popularize the deep learning approach and in 2019 prestigious Turing AwardPresented by the Computing Machinery Association.
Since then, LeCun’s approach to AI development has veered from the direction taken by Meta and the rest of Silicon Valley.
Other technology companies, such as Meta and OpenAI, have spent billions of dollars developing underlying models, particularly LLMs, as part of their efforts to develop cutting-edge computing. But LeCun and other deep learning experts said that while these existing AI models are powerful, they provide a limited understanding of the world, and new computing architectures are needed for researchers to create software that matches or surpasses humans at certain tasks, a concept known as artificial general intelligence.
“As I predict, AMI will have far-reaching applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which align with Meta’s business interests, but many of which do not,” LeCun wrote in his post. he said. “Pursuing AMI’s purpose in an independent organization is one way to maximize its broad impact.”
Besides Wang, other key figures Zuckerberg has brought in to revamp Meta’s AI unit include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who heads the unit’s product team, and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, the group’s chief scientist.
In October, Meta laid off 600 employees from its Super Intelligence Labs division; among them were people who were part of the FAIR unit that LeCun helped launch. Layoffs and other cuts at FAIR over the years, along with a new AI leadership team, played a key role in LeCun’s decision to leave, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Additionally, LeCun rarely interacted with Wang and the TBD Labs unit; This is due to Zuckerberg’s many hirings that made headlines over the summer. Sources said TBD Labs oversaw the development of Meta’s Llama AI models, which were originally developed within FAIR.
While LeCun has always been an advocate of sharing AI research and related technologies with the open source community, Wang and his team prefer a more closed approach in the face of intense competition from rivals like OpenAI and Google.
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