Meta's head of artificial intelligence (AI) research, Yann LeCun, has confirmed that he will be leaving the company at the end of this year to start his own AI company. Previously, there have been rumors that LeCun will leave Meta, which he joined in 2013.
The new AI company that LeCun will establish will focus on the development of Advanced Machine Intelligence. AMI wants to realize intelligence for machines such as robots to operate in the real world using world models.
While at Meta, LeCun was the lead researcher at Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Lab. LeCun was among the early pioneers of AI technology, receiving the Turing Award in 2019 for his contributions to deep learning and in 2024 for reinforcement learning.
Rumors that LeCun will leave Meta began to be heard after Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) was established in July. He has to report to Alexandr Wang who heads MSL, even though the founder of Scale AI never graduated from MIT. Then when MSL laid off more than 600 staff last month to restructure, he was again reported to be resigning.
