Meta chief AI scientist and one of 'Godfathers of AI' Yann LeCun may exit company

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief artificial intelligence (AI) scientist and a pioneer in deep learning, 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.

LeCun’s role shifts amid reorganisation

The rumoured departure comes as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has significantly increased its investments in AI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently reorganised the company's AI initiatives under a new unit called Superintelligence Labs.This reorganisation included the hiring of Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, to lead the new AI effort. According to the report, LeCun, who previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, has now shifted to reporting directly to Wang.LeCun is a highly influential figure in the field of AI, recognised for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional neural network (CNN), which is crucial for modern image, video, and speech recognition systems.

He was recruited by Meta in 2013 to launch the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit. He is also a Silver Professor at New York University.In 2018, LeCun, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, won the prestigious Turing Award for their foundational advancements in deep neural networks, technology that has paved the way for the current AI boom. Hinton worked at Google before leaving the company in 2023.Despite his prominent position, LeCun is a known skeptic of the current large language model (LLM) path to superintelligence, often advocating for alternative approaches in the pursuit of more human-like AI.