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Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist and one of the original architects of deep learning, is preparing to leave the company after more than a decade at the center of its research efforts. The Financial Times first reported the news, citing associates who say LeCun plans to step down in the coming months amid growing friction inside Meta’s AI division. His next move? Launching his own startup focused on advancing a new kind of artificial intelligence that thinks more like humans do. LeCun’s exit marks a turning point for Meta. A Turing Award laureate and one of the so-called “godfathers of AI” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, LeCun helped pioneer the convolutional neural network—the backbone of modern computer vision and much of today’s machine learning. After joining Facebook in 2013, he built the company’s Fundamental AI Research lab, better known as FAIR, which became a powerhouse of open-source innovation. FAIR’s work gave rise to the Llama family of models, helping democratize access to large language models across the tech industry. “Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social media giant to found his own start-up,” The Financial Times reported. But the culture that once prized open research has shifted. Since early 2025, Meta has gone through repeated reorganizations, folding its AI teams under a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The group is led by 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO, following Meta’s $14.3 billion deal for a 49% stake in Scale. Under the new structure, LeCun now reports to Wang, a move insiders say reflects a company pivot away from pure research and toward commercial AI deployment at breakneck speed. “Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the pioneers of modern AI, has told associates he will leave the Silicon Valley group in the coming months.” Inside Meta’s AI Meltdown: Yann LeCun’s Exit Sends Shockwaves Through Meta’s AI Division Amid Internal Turmoil and AI Strategy Clash That pivot hasn’t come without friction. Sources told the Financial Times that LeCun has grown frustrated with shrinking budgets, layoffs within his lab, and the reallocation of computing resources to support generative AI projects. Meta’s decision to prioritize scaling large language models for consumer products, including chatbots and AI assistants, has sidelined FAIR’s exploratory work. The company’s capital spending plans—expected to top $100 billion next year—underscore how deeply Meta is betting on product-focused AI. At the heart of the disagreement is a philosophical split about what intelligence actually is. LeCun has long argued that today’s large language models, or LLMs, are limited because they rely on statistical pattern matching rather than real reasoning. Earlier this year, he posted on X: “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat.” His research focuses on “world models,” systems that learn by observing and predicting the physical world—a path he believes will lead to AI that can reason, plan, and understand cause and effect. People close to the company describe Meta’s internal environment as tense. Several veteran researchers have left FAIR in recent months, including its former head, Joelle Pineau, who joined AI startup Cohere. The Llama team has reportedly thinned out as well. One insider told TechCrunch that FAIR “feels like it’s dying a slow death,” while others described a growing divide between researchers and product teams. LeCun’s decision to leave adds to a broader trend: the brain drain from Big Tech to smaller, independent AI ventures. His move follows a wave of departures across the industry, including Ilya Sutskever’s launch of Safe Superintelligence, which reached a $30 billion valuation before releasing a single product. Investors are already said to be circling LeCun’s upcoming venture, eager to back one of AI’s founding visionaries. For Meta, the loss is both symbolic and strategic. FAIR was once the intellectual engine of its AI ambitions. Without LeCun at the helm, Meta risks losing one of its strongest academic anchors at a time when the company is racing to catch up with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Shares dipped slightly in premarket trading Tuesday after the news broke, reflecting investor unease over the growing instability inside Meta’s AI operations. LeCun is expected to remain a professor at New York University while he develops his new company, continuing his lifelong pursuit of human-like AI. Whether his next chapter becomes a rival force to Big Tech—or the spark for a new research renaissance—remains to be seen. But his departure sends a clear signal: the future of AI innovation may no longer belong to the giants.
