Yann LeCun Leaves Meta to Launch Ambitious AI Startup

Meta AI luminary Yann LeCun is surprisingly leaving the company to create his venture, which will perform revolutionary work on AI to create systems that understand the physical world, remember things, reason, and plan complex actions.

In a memo, LeCun said the new company will take AI far beyond the current limits of generative models.

Clashes and Shifts Within Meta

Internal disagreements were the reason for LeCun's departure, sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg. Meta has recently set up a generative AI unit separate from the rest, advancing newer recruits like ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao while sidelining LeCun.

Setting aside a big name like LeCun signals Meta's desire to experiment with a new strategy.

Pivoting a high-profile generative AI project to another expert is part of the company's plans to focus on fundamental AI research.

World Models Over LLMs

For years, LeCun has advocated for "world models," AI that can reason about and interact with the physical world, while insisting that large language models (LLMs), the basis of ChatGPT and its category, are insufficient to achieve AGI. AI should incorporate sensory inputs such as vision to understand cause and effect, and he disparages today's systems as "dumber than cats."

However, in his April statement, LeCun criticized AI hype with bigger models. He emphasized that the "most interesting problems scale extremely badly," that why one "cannot just assume that more data and more compute mean smarter AI."

At Meta, LeCun's work in the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) department produced innovations like V-JEPA-2, a model trained on videos to model physical interactions rather than simply replicating them. His new startup is expected to continue this line of research independently.

LeCun Will Still License Startup Creations to Meta

Although he's leaving, LeCun intends to license whatever his startup creates to Meta. That arrangement is part of a larger phenomenon in AI: Microsoft and Google have stakes in the startups OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively. The companies are interdependent.

According to LeCun's memo, his new technology may apply to industries in and out of Meta's commercial interests.

According to Gizmodo, LeCun prefers the term Advanced Machine Intelligence, rather than AGI, for the emphasis on collaborative and capable, rather than threatening, systems. He says that an independent organization focused on AMI will have the most impact on many different sectors and represents a strategic pivot away from the LLM-centric AI mainstream.

Even before LeCun leaves the company, Meta has already made huge changes to boost its superintelligence research. Mark Zuckerberg hired Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung from OpenAI at that time.