Meta's chief AI scientist is leaving the company after 12 years to create a startup

What you need to know

• Meta's chief AI scientist is leaving the company at the end of this year to found a startup.
• Yann LeCun, the creator of Meta's FAIR research division and an AI trailblazer, spent 12 years at the company.
• LeCun's new startup aims to build AI world models, and it'll partner with Meta.

Meta is becoming an artificial intelligence company, injecting Meta AI into its social apps and hardware. However, the AI scholar and trailblazer that led the company's research efforts for over a decade is now leaving Meta to create a new startup. Yann LeCun, Meta's vice president and chief AI scientist, will depart to build a company aiming to "bring about the next revolution in AI."

The company continues LeCun's research on Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), which he has studied as part of Meta's FAIR research devision and at New York University as a professor. LeCun will remain at Meta until the end of this year, and says more details about the new company will be shared later. Critically, we do know that Meta will partner with LeCun's new company "because of their continued interest and support."

LeCun confirmed his upcoming departure in a post on Threads and other social platforms Wednesday, Nov. 19.

Most consumer AI products currently available are large language models (LLM), which have a sizable knowledge base from written text and other works. However, LLMs struggle to stay current or provide a deep understanding of the world. With LeCun's AMI program, the researcher aims to build world models that deliver reasoning, knowledge, and capabilities that come close to or match that of the human mind.

"As I envision it, AMI will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not," LeCun writes. "Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact."

The shakeup will put Meta's FAIR research division in new hands for the first time since its inception. It comes at a time when Meta is acquiring AI talent and companies to compete with the likes of Google, OpenAI, and others.

"The impact of FAIR on the company, on the field of AI, on the tech community, and on the wider world has been spectacular," LeCun says. "The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment."