Meta loses Yann LeCun, its chief scientist and one of the ‘godfathers of AI’

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief scientist and one of the “godfathers of AI”, is leaving the company.

He will quit to launch his own company focused on building new systems that are useful in the real world, he said in a social media post.

It comes amid vast investment from Facebook and parent company Meta in artificial intelligence – and increasing fears that spending could be part of a bubble around AI.

Professor LeCun has worked at Meta for 12 years. Through that period, with much of his work focused on advanced machine learning technologies.

But recent work on AI at Meta has been increasingly looking at large language models, or LLMs, such as those used in Meta’s own Llama and rivals such as ChatGPT.

Professor LeCun has at times been openly skeptical about the claims made about possible advancements in those technologies. He has repeatedly said that their intelligence is being exaggerated and that they are limited in the ways that they can actually understand the real world.

He suggested that his new company will be focused instead on systems that try and get around those limitations. “The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences,” he wrote on Threads.

Meta will be a partner of the new company, he said, and he thanks executives including Mark Zuckerberg for their support of FAIR, the in-house AI research organisation that he has led.

But he said that while some of the aims of his new start-up might overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, much of it might not. “Pursuing the goal of [advanced machine intelligence] in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact,” he said.