Yann LeCun, the chief AI researcher at Meta, intends to depart from the company within the next few months to establish his own startup. According to the Financial Times, he shared this information with several friends.
One source indicated that LeCun, a recipient of the Turing Award, is already in early discussions to secure funding for his new venture, but no official comments have been made by either party thus far.
He is leaving Meta at a time when the company is revising its strategy for artificial intelligence to compete more effectively against Google and OpenAI. As part of this strategy, Mark Zuckerberg has opted for rapid implementation of new models and products over prolonged research efforts by LeCun's lab.
In pursuit of its goals, Meta has been actively poaching AI specialists from other companies to form a new team in recent months. In June, Alexander Wang, the founder and former CEO of Scale AI, joined the company. Zuckerberg has also repeatedly tried to lure employees from Apple and OpenAI, drawing criticism from Sam Altman.
These strategic changes have led to some disagreements between CEO Zuckerberg and chief researcher LeCun. LeCun has stated that while the models developed by Meta can be useful, they will never achieve human-level cognition.