They announced that Yann LeCun, one of Meta’s top AI researchers, is leaving to set up his own AI startup after working at the company for 12 years. LeCun, who is also a professor at New York University, joined the company in 2013 to lead Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) Lab and later took on the role of chief AI scientist.
LeCun said his new startup will “continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) that I have been leading for the past several years with colleagues at FAIR, NYU, and beyond” and that it will partner with Meta. “The startup aims to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and plan complex task sequences,” he wrote in an update on the threads. “AMI will have far-reaching applications across many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not. Pursuing AMI’s goal in an independent entity is one way to maximize its broader impact.”
Speculation regarding Laken’s future in the Meta has been increasing in recent months. Earlier this year, the company invested nearly $15 billion in Scale AI and named 28-year-old CEO Alexander Wang as its chief AI officer. Meta also recruited Shengjia Zhao, who helped create GPT-4, becoming the chief AI scientist of its newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs unit.
LeCun, on the other hand, has been openly skeptical of LLM. “We can’t get to human-level AI just by scaling up LLMs,” he said during an appearance on the Big Technology podcast earlier this year. And in a recent talk at a conference, he advised aspiring researchers to “not work on an LLM at all,” the report said. Wall Street Journal.
Additionally, Meta is shuffling its AI teams. The company last month cut “several hundred” jobs from its superintelligence group, including FAIR. And LeCun “had difficulty getting resources for his projects at Meta as the company focused more on building models to counter immediate threats from rivals including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Anthropic.” bloomberg Informed.
LeCun said he would remain at META until the end of the year. “I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR and the AMI program over the past few years,” he wrote.