Founder-CEO of AI startup reveals why he quit Meta frustrated: ‘Mark Zuckerberg has...'

The former Meta AI scientist said Mark Zuckerberg's constant reorgs at the tech giant and talent wars pushed him to launch his own company. (Image credit: AFP)

Shawn Shen, a former Meta AI research scientist, has revealed why he left the tech giant to launch his own startup, Memories.ai — a company building AI models that can “see and remember” like humans. In an interview with Business Insider, the 28-year-old said Meta has been constantly reorganising itself, leading to frequent changes in managers and goals, which many employees find frustrating. It's one of the reasons why he and several others chose to quit the tech giant, he said.

Shen, 28, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and worked on generative AI at Meta before quitting in late 2023. He raised $8 million in seed funding this summer, backed by Samsung and other investors, and is now offering up to $2 million compensation packages — mostly in equity — to lure top researchers from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and xAI.

“Meta is constantly doing reorganisations. Your manager and your goals can change every few months. For some researchers, it can be really frustrating and feel like a waste of time," Shen said. He added that it's a driver for people to leave Meta and join other companies, especially startups.

"There are other reasons people might leave. I think the biggest one is what Mark (Zuckerberg) has said: in an age that's evolving so fast, the biggest risk is not taking any risks. So why not do that and potentially change the world as part of a trillion-dollar company?" he told Business Insider.

He added that Meta’s new AI unit, Superintelligence Labs, has intensified competition for talent, with some researchers receiving offers in the tens of millions. “It shows that AI researchers who stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money,” Shen said.

Memories.ai recently hired Chi-Hao Wu, Shen's manager at Meta, as Chief AI Officer. Shen said the company plans to hire up to 15 people over the next year, treating them as founding members rather than employees. “Equity is where you can get a hundred or even a thousand times return in the future,” he said.