One of artificial intelligence's founding fathers is walking away from Silicon Valley's biggest stage. Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and co-winner of the prestigious Turing Award, announced Wednesday he's leaving the company to launch his own startup focused on "world models" - AI systems that understand the physical world rather than just text and images. The departure marks the end of an era for Meta's pioneering FAIR research lab and signals growing tensions within the company's AI strategy.
The AI world just lost one of its most influential voices to the startup scene. Yann LeCun, the 65-year-old computer scientist who helped lay the foundation for modern artificial intelligence, is stepping away from Meta after more than a decade to chase what he calls "the next big revolution in AI."
"I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing," LeCun wrote in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. "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."
The timing couldn't be more telling. LeCun's departure comes as Meta undergoes what insiders describe as "disarray" within its AI division. The company's Llama 4 model launch earlier this year fell flat with developers, prompting CEO Mark Zuckerberg to open the corporate checkbook wide. The most dramatic move was June's $14.5 billion investment to lure 28-year-old Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, who now serves as Meta's chief AI officer.
But here's the twist - despite leaving, LeCun says Meta will partner with his new venture. "Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company," he explained, thanking Zuckerberg and other executives for backing his Advanced Machine Intelligence program.
LeCun joined Facebook (now Meta) in 2013 to direct the newly created FAIR (Facebook AI Research) division while keeping his NYU professorship. "The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment," he noted. Back then, Facebook and Google were in an academic talent war, recruiting top researchers to build their AI capabilities from scratch.
The French-born scientist belongs to AI royalty. Along with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, LeCun pioneered deep learning - the neural network approach that powers everything from ChatGPT to image recognition. The trio shared the 2019 Turing Award, computer science's highest honor, for making AI actually work at scale.
