Meta may be about to lose one of its most renowned AI heads: Yann LeCun, a chief AI scientist at the company, is planning to leave the company to build his own startup, the Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources.
LeCun, a professor at New York University, senior researcher at Meta, and winner of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, plans to leave in the coming months, and is already in talks to raise capital for a startup that would focus on continuing his work on world models, the report added.
A world model is an AI system that develops an internal understanding of its environment so it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios to predict outcomes. Top labs and startups like Google DeepMind and World Labs are also developing world models.
LeCun’s departure would come at a pivotal time for Meta, which has of late changed how it approaches AI development in response to concerns that it is being outpaced by rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
The company has reportedly started revamping its AI organization after hiring over 50 engineers and researchers from its competitors to build out a new AI unit, dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Notably, Meta in June invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling vendor Scale AI and brought on board its CEO Alexandr Wang to run the new division.
Those decisions, sources told TechCrunch in August, have made things increasingly chaotic at Meta’s AI unit, with new talent expressing frustration with navigating the bureaucracy of a big company, while Meta’s previous generative AI team has seen its scope limited.
LeCun’s long-term research work at the company under its Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR) division has been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions to overhaul things after the company’s previous family of AI models, Llama 4, failed to keep up with rival models. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research — techniques that may be used five to 10 years from now.
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LeCun has been openly skeptical about how AI technology — specifically LLMs — is currently being marketed as the cure for all of humankind’s ails. He even tweeted that AI systems have a long way to go.
“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.
Meta did not immediately return a request for comment outside regular business hours.
