Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is leaving to found his own startup in the coming months, according to a new report. This is a huge blow for Meta, which went on an aggressive, expensive hiring spree in 2025 to build out its AI development divisions with key talent, often attempting to poach them from competitors. A 12-year veteran of the company, LeCun has been instrumental in Meta's AI research throughout many of the company's eras, but now seems set to strike out on his own to develop what he sees as the next frontier in AI development, the Financial Times reports.
French-American Yann LeCun has a long history of AI research, with notable work in the fields of optical character recognition and computer vision. He received the Turing Award in 2018 for his work on deep learning, and alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, is often referred to as one of the three "Godfathers of AI."
He became the director of Meta's AI research division in 2013, before becoming its chief AI scientist later that decade. Despite his long tenure at the company, those around him claim he's keen to move on to develop "World Models." Unlike the large language models (LLM) of today's AI, World Models use video and spatial data, rather than text, to understand the world around them. These are particularly handy for anything interfacing with the real world, such as robotics or self-driving cars.
This is distinctly different from the approach Meta is taking with its current AI division, which may be the catalyst behind LeCun looking to explore greener pastures.
Second place and third-fiddle
Like Google and Microsoft, once the shockwaves of OpenAI's ChatGPT launch were felt throughout the industry, Meta pivoted toward developing its own large language models. It had maintained an AI research division for over a decade, and Mark Zuckerberg had spent the previous few years pushing his Metaverse VR concept as hard as his multi-billion-dollar fortune and multi-trillion-dollar company would allow.
But to date, Meta has struggled to make a serious impact. Meta's Llama AI models having clear weighting has drawn praise, but it has repeatedly underperformed when compared to competitors such as DeepSeek, Google, and xAI.
In an effort to remain competitive, Meta went on a hiring spree this year, spending over $14 billion to acquire the CEO of data annotation firm, ScaleAI, Alexandr Wang, as well as offering signing bonuses of up to $100 million, while attempting to poach top talent from OpenAI, Google, and others. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly maintained a list of the most enticing talent and reached out to many of them personally to try to secure their employment, all while it struggled to retain the talent it already had.
Zuckerberg has come under increasing pressure from Meta investors to show the potential profit behind his AI investments. Meta's stock lost over $240 billion in value after Zuckerberg revealed plans to spend over $100 billion in AI in 2026.
This may be why, with this influx of new talent, Meta has pivoted away from developing an AI to compete with contemporary models and is instead focusing on developing "superintelligence" as part of a newly designated "TBD lab." Under this new structure, Meta's AI product team, data center and infrastructure teams, and fundamental AI research team led by LeCun, would all report directly to the 28-year-old Alexandr Wang.
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