Yann LeCun, known as one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence and one of the first AI visionaries to join the company then known as Facebook, is leaving Meta .
LuCun said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that he plans to create a startup that specializes in a kind of AI technology that researchers have described as world models, analyzing information beyond web data in order to better represent the physical world and its properties.
"I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond," LeCun wrote. "The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences."
Meta will partner with LeCun's startup.
The departure comes at a time of disarray within Meta's AI unit, which was dramatically overhauled this year after the company released the fourth version of its Llama open-source large language model to a disappointing response from developers. That spurred CEO Mark Zuckerberg to spend billions of dollars recruiting top AI talent, including a June $14.5 billion investment in Scale AI to lure the startup's 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang, now Meta's new chief AI officer.
LeCun, 65, joined Facebook in 2013 to be director of the FAIR AI research division while maintaining a part-time professorial position at New York University. He said in the LinkedIn post that the "creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment."
"I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of the AMI program over the last few years," LeCun said. "Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company."
At the time, Facebook and Google were heavily recruiting high-level academics like LeCun to spearhead their efforts to produce cutting-edge computer science research that could potentially benefit their core businesses and products.
LeCun, along with other AI luminaries like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, centered their academic research on a kind of AI technique known as deep learning, which involves the training of enormous software systems called neural networks so they can discover patterns within reams of data. The researchers helped popularize the deep learning approach, and in 2019 won the prestigious Turing Award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery.
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