Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist and one of the important figures in deep learning, confirmed in a LinkedIn post that he’ll leave the corporation after 12 years to build a new AI startup.
His resignation follows current reports about leadership shifts throughout Meta’s AI and broader operational structure. LeCun explained the move as the next segment of a long-running research effort targeted at what he calls Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI).
LeCun demonstrated on his time at Meta by emphasizing the development of the Facebook AI Research lab (FAIR). “The effect of FAIR on the corporation, on the field of AI, on the tech community, and on the wider world has been spectacular. The formation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical achievement,” he wrote.
LeCun spent 5-years as FAIR’s founding director and 7-years as Meta’s Chief AI Scientist.
A New Venture goal at the “Next Big Revolution in AI”
LeCun stated his new corporation will keep the AMI studies program he has followed with collaborators at FAIR, NYU, and partner institutions. The project goals are to build AI systems that could recognize the physical world, hold lasting memory, reason, and plan complicated action sequences—capabilities far beyond those of recent large language and multimodal models.
“The aim of the startup is to bring about the next massive development in AI: systems that apprehend the physical world, have continual memory, can reason, and might plan complex action next,” he stated in his statement.
This research direction indicators a broader push in the direction of AI models able to generalized, grounded intelligence in preference to pattern-recognition systems enhanced for text or imagery. LeCun has been vocal about the limits of today’s foundation models and believes new architectures will be needed to obtain human-level reasoning.
Meta Will Remain a Partner
In spite of the departure, LeCun highlighted that Meta leadership has assisted his research and will continue to play a position in the latest project. He thanked Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for backing FAIR and the AMI program.
“Because of their continued interest and help, Meta will be a partner of the new corporation,” he confirmed. While a few use cases will overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, LeCun stated targeting AMI independently will permit its broader economic effect.
A Strategic Exit Amid Internal Restructuring
LeCun’s resignation comes as Meta goes through widespread organizational changes, consisting of adjustments inside its AI unit. His exit marks the corporations most significant AI leadership transition because major reshuffling started out earlier this year. For Meta, closing affiliated with LeCun’s latest corporation offers it proximity to a research direction that would outline the next era of AI.
LeCun will stay at Meta through the end of the year and plans to launch more details about the startup at a later date.
