Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is reportedly planning to leave to build his startup

Meta may be about to lose one of its most famous AI heads: Yann LeCun, the company’s chief AI scientist, is planning to leave the company to found his startup, The Financial Times. I mentionedciting anonymous sources.

LeCun, a professor at New York University and a senior meta-researcher, and Winner of the prestigious AM Turing AwardThe report added that he intends to leave in the coming months, and is already in talks to raise capital for a startup that will focus on continuing his work on global models.

A global model is an artificial intelligence system that develops an internal understanding of its environment so that it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios to predict outcomes. Top labs and startups like Google DeepMind and Laboratories of the world They are also models for the developing world.

LeCun’s departure will come at a pivotal time for the Meta, which happened recently change How it approaches AI development in response to concerns that it is being outpaced by competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

The company was reportedly started renewal Its own artificial intelligence organization yet Employment More than 50 engineers and Researchers From its competitors to build a new artificial intelligence unit, called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Notably, Meta invested in June $14.3 billion at data classification vendor Scale AI and appointed its CEO Alexander Wang to run the new division.

Those decisions Sources told TechCrunch in Augustmade things increasingly chaotic at Meta’s AI unit, with new talent expressing frustration at dealing with the bureaucracy of a large company, while Meta’s previous generative AI team saw limited scope.

LeCun’s long-term research work at the company within its Fundamental AI Research Laboratory (FAIR) division has been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions to patch things up after the company’s previous family of AI models. Llama 4failed to keep up with competing models. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research, technologies that could be used five to ten years from now.

LeCun has been out in public Skeptical About how AI technology – specifically MBA – is currently being marketed as a cure for all of humanity’s ills. He even chirp AI systems have a long way to go.

“It seems to me that before we urgently figure out how to control AI systems smarter than ourselves, we need to get a head start on designing a system smarter than a house cat,” he wrote.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.