Meta AI chief Yann LeCun reportedly leaving company

It seems like AI is always changing, with the meta seeing more changes than others. The company has recently laid off 600 people from its AI unit.

Now, Meta’s chief AI scientist and New York University professor Yann LeCun plans to leave the company and create his own startup, anonymous sources told the Financial Times. Meta did not immediately respond to Mashable’s request for comment.

LeCun, who won the prestigious AM Turing Award for breakthroughs in AI, will leave in the coming months to work on a startup focused on his own world model, the report said. According to the Financial Times, he is already working on raising capital for the startup.

LeCun wouldn’t be the first to focus on world models, which, according to TechCrunch, are AI systems that “develop an internal understanding of its environment so that it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios to predict outcomes.” World Lab, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia are also developing world models.

This comes at a time when Meta is injecting heavy amounts of AI into users’ feeds and is keenly working to keep up with AI rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.