Hyperbolic CTO Says Mark Zuckerberg 'behind' exit of Meta's chief scientist Yann LeCun, he made him report to ...

Meta’s chief scientist Yann LeCun is reportedly planning to leave the social media company to launch his own startup. LeCun, who is widely known as one of the "Godfathers of AI," is also in early talks to raise funds for his new venture, a report by The Financial Times (via news agency Reuters) claimed, citing people familiar with the matter.

Now, in a bold statement Hyperbolic CEO and CTO Yuchen Jin alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was directly responsible for the reported departure of Yann LeCun. In a post shared on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Jin said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s actions are responsible for this decision made by the company’s longtime chief AI scientist. The comments made by Jin comes at a time when speculation about internal tensions at Meta are growing.

LeCun’s exit ‘inevitable’, says Jin

In the social media post, Jin claimed that LeCun’s exit was ‘an outcome’ which became unavoidable after the $15 billion acquisition of ScaleAI and the appointment of Alexandr Wang. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an investment of $15 billion in AI startup ScaleAI this year. Soon, after the investment he also appointed ScaleAI founder Alexandr Wang to lead Meta’s new “superintelligence” division. As per Jin, the decision of Zuckerberg to According to Jin, Zuckerberg’s decision to have LeCun report to Wang signaled a shift in priorities — away from foundational AI research and toward rapid, product-driven development.

“Yann never believed in LLM-to-AGI. Zuck’s patience ran out,” Jin wrote, referencing LeCun’s well-known skepticism of large language models as a path to artificial general intelligence.

Meta’s AI strategy in flux

LeCun, who previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, was reassigned under Wang earlier this year. The restructuring reflects Zuckerberg’s urgency to catch up with OpenAI and Google in the generative AI race, especially after Meta’s Llama 4 model failed to match the performance of ChatGPT.Jin suggested that Zuckerberg “panicked” after OpenAI’s success and pivoted Meta’s AI strategy aggressively, sidelining LeCun’s long-term vision in favor of Wang’s fast-paced, LLM-centric approach.

Google’s Noam Shazeer as a cautionary tale

Talking about LeCun’s reported exit, Jim drew parallels from Noam Shazeer, the AI pioneer behind Google’s LaMDA, who left to co-found Character.AI. Google later spent $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.AI’s technology and bring Shazeer back. Jin hinted that Meta might face a similar reckoning: “Zuck might buy Yann back at a crazy price,” he wrote.Despite the internal shake-up, Wang defended Meta’s trajectory, citing a 105% month-over-month surge in Meta AI visits in October 2025, outperforming competitors like Perplexity and Claude.