Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to leave Meta and start new AI research company

Renowned artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun announced Wednesday he will step down as Meta’s chief AI scientist at the end of the year to launch his own startup focused on advanced AI research.

The French computer scientist, who has been with Meta since 2013, revealed his plans in a social media post where he outlined his vision for a new company that will develop AI systems capable of understanding the physical world, maintaining persistent memory, reasoning, and planning complex sequences of actions.

LeCun confirmed that Meta will partner with his new venture, with some research overlapping with the tech giant’s commercial interests while other aspects will explore different directions. The announcement follows more than a week of industry rumors about his potential departure.

His exit comes during a period of significant transition for Meta’s AI division. Earlier this fall, the company began reducing its AI workforce, cutting approximately 600 positions as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s strategic realignment of the company’s artificial intelligence priorities.

In June, Meta made a substantial $14.3 billion investment in AI data company Scale and recruited its CEO Alexandr Wang to spearhead a team focused on developing what Zuckerberg has described as “superintelligence.” This move signaled Meta’s intensifying focus on competing with industry rivals like Google and OpenAI in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

LeCun’s tenure at Meta has been influential and far-reaching. After joining Facebook in 2013, he co-founded the company’s AI research division, initially known as Facebook AI Research. While he stepped down as the group’s director in 2018, he continued to serve as Meta’s chief AI scientist, helping to shape the company’s approach to artificial intelligence research and development.

Throughout his career, LeCun has been known for his distinctive perspectives on AI development. He has consistently expressed skepticism about the sophistication of large language models that power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While acknowledging their utility, he has questioned whether these systems represent a viable path toward artificial general intelligence that surpasses human capabilities—a goal that some tech leaders have enthusiastically promoted.

LeCun has also been a vocal advocate for open-source AI systems, supporting Meta’s approach with its Llama large language model, which makes key components publicly accessible. This stance has sometimes put him at odds with AI safety advocates who argue that such open access could present risks if misused.

Beyond his corporate role, LeCun maintains a connection to academia as a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. His academic background includes education in his native France and Canada before his early career at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he pioneered work on AI systems for reading text in digitized images.

His contributions to computer science received the highest recognition in 2019 when he was awarded the Turing Award—often described as the “Nobel Prize of computing”—alongside fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. The trio was honored for their foundational work on deep learning, which has revolutionized machine learning approaches and enabled significant advances in speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing.

Meta has not yet announced who will succeed LeCun in the chief AI scientist role, nor has the company issued an official statement regarding his departure. The transition occurs as Meta continues to navigate competitive pressures in the AI sector while balancing research priorities with commercial applications.