Meta’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist, Yann LeCun, is planning to leave the social media giant to start his own company, according to the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the matter.
The deep-learning pioneer is reportedly in early talks to raise funds for his new venture, marking the likely end of a decade-long tenure at the heart of Meta’s AI evolution.
LeCun’s departure comes at a pivotal time for Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which has dramatically intensified its investments in artificial intelligence. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently restructured the company’s AI operations under a new division known as Superintelligence Labs. This move underscores Meta’s growing ambitions to rival OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).
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As part of this overhaul, Zuckerberg recruited Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, to lead the new AI initiative. The shake-up shifted reporting lines within Meta’s AI leadership, with LeCun — who previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox — now reporting directly to Wang. The change reportedly signaled a major organizational realignment, aimed at accelerating Meta’s efforts to integrate AI across its platforms and hardware ecosystem.
Zuckerberg has spent resources building Meta’s artificial intelligence empire, pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and research. The company pledged to invest $600 billion in the U.S. over the next three years to support data centers and computing systems capable of running large-scale AI models. That spending spree has been matched with aggressive recruitment of top AI talent globally — a strategy that helped establish Meta’s Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit, which LeCun founded in 2013.
LeCun, who also serves as a Silver Professor at New York University, is renowned for pioneering deep learning and inventing the convolutional neural network (CNN) — technology that underpins much of today’s image, video, and speech recognition systems. Alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, he received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often described as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” for his contributions to the field.
His exit, however, is expected to leave a recruitment gap within Meta’s AI leadership, as the company continues to compete for scarce global expertise in machine learning and neural systems. Some suggest that replacing a figure of LeCun’s stature will not be easy, particularly as Meta faces increasing pressure to close the technological gap with OpenAI’s GPT models and Google’s Gemini systems.
LeCun has long been known for his skepticism toward large language models as the ultimate path to superintelligence, often arguing for more biologically inspired and energy-efficient approaches. His departure could therefore mark a philosophical turning point for Meta’s AI strategy — away from his theoretical orientation and further toward applied generative systems favored by Zuckerberg’s new AI leadership team.
LeCun’s planned startup reportedly aims to explore “alternative foundations” for building general intelligence, though no specific details have yet been made public. If realized, the move could signal a new wave of independent AI ventures led by the original pioneers of deep learning — a trend already evident in Geoffrey Hinton’s exit from Google last year.
As Meta ramps up spending and research to dominate the next era of computing, the loss of LeCun’s vision may reshape the company’s AI culture.