AI pioneer Yann LeCun leaves Meta amid internal AI turmoil

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun, one of the godfathers of modern AI and Meta’s most influential research voice for more than a decade, is leaving the company to build a new startup focused on “advanced machine intelligence.” The new venture will develop world-model AI systems capable of understanding physical environments, reasoning, holding long-term memory and executing complex plans. Meta will remain a partner.

Announcing his decision on LinkedIn, LeCun said the company will continue the AMI research programme he built across FAIR and New York University. The goal, he wrote, is to spark the “next big revolution” in AI by moving beyond systems trained solely on text scraped from the web.

Meta's internal AI upheaval
His exit comes during choppy waters for Meta’s AI efforts. After Llama 4 received a lukewarm response from developers, Mark Zuckerberg overhauled the entire AI division. This included a massive $14.5 billion investment in Scale AI to bring in its CEO, Alexandr Wang, now Meta’s chief AI officer. Other big-name hires, like former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao, were brought in to rebuild the company’s ambition in foundation models.

But the restructuring also led to layoffs. In October, Meta cut 600 jobs from its Superintelligence Labs team, including many who had been part of FAIR — the very research unit LeCun helped create in 2013. These cuts, along with major leadership changes, played a significant role in his departure, according to people familiar with the matter.

LeCun, 65, is widely credited with helping establish deep learning as a dominant AI paradigm, winning the 2019 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. But in recent years he has been increasingly vocal about the limitations of today’s LLM-driven AI, arguing that new architectures are needed to achieve genuine reasoning and general intelligence.

By spinning out AMI as an independent entity, LeCun says he hopes to maximise its impact across industries — not only those aligned with Meta’s long-term interests.