Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Plans To Exit To Launch Startup
(Wednesday November 12, 2025 @05:00AM (BeauHD)
from the greener-pastures dept.)
- Reference: 0180051802
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/12/027252/meta-chief-ai-scientist-yann-lecun-plans-to-exit-to-launch-startup
- Source link:
According to the [1]Financial Times (paywalled), Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, a deep-learning pioneer and Turing Award winner, is reportedly [2]leaving the company to launch his own startup . Reuters reports:
> The owner of Facebook and Instagram has significantly increased its investments in artificial intelligence, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg reorganizing the company's AI initiatives under Superintelligence Labs. Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI to lead the new AI effort. As a result, LeCun, who had reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang, the report said.
>
> The company began investing in AI in 2013 by launching Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit and recruiting LeCun, who is a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. LeCun is also a Silver Professor of data science, computer science, neural science and electrical and computer engineering at New York University, according to his LinkedIn page. He is known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional neural network, which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c586eb77-a16e-4363-ab0b-e877898b70de
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-chief-ai-scientist-yann-lecun-plans-exit-launch-startup-ft-reports-2025-11-11/
> The owner of Facebook and Instagram has significantly increased its investments in artificial intelligence, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg reorganizing the company's AI initiatives under Superintelligence Labs. Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI to lead the new AI effort. As a result, LeCun, who had reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang, the report said.
>
> The company began investing in AI in 2013 by launching Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit and recruiting LeCun, who is a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. LeCun is also a Silver Professor of data science, computer science, neural science and electrical and computer engineering at New York University, according to his LinkedIn page. He is known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional neural network, which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c586eb77-a16e-4363-ab0b-e877898b70de
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-chief-ai-scientist-yann-lecun-plans-exit-launch-startup-ft-reports-2025-11-11/
Possible in favor of open source (Score:1)
Rumors are, that he does not like that Meta seems to change its course related to releasing models as open source. The Llama 4 release didn't work out that good and people are seriously doubting we will see Llama 5 with open weights and LeCun was in favor of the releases.
Re: (Score:2)
Open weights are a waste of time. What is required is all the raw source data plus training schedules and scripts. That's what open source means.
An open weight model is like an mp4 movie. They give you a compressed datafile and tell you to run it in your favourite (movie) player software.