A different approach towards AI
LeCun founded Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab, known as FAIR, in 2013 and has served as the company’s chief AI scientist since then. He is one of three researchers who won the 2018 Turing Award for pioneering work on deep learning and convolutional neural networks. After leaving META, LeCun will remain a professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003.
Lacan has previously argued that the large language models like llamas that Zuckerberg has placed at the center of his strategy are useful, but they will never be able to reason and plan like humans, which seems to contradict his boss’s grand AI vision of developing rapid “superintelligence.”
For example, in May 2024, when an OpenAI researcher discussed the need to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun responded on
Mark Zuckerberg once believed that the “Metaverse” was the future and changed the name of his company because of it.
Credit: Facebook
Within FAIR, LeCun has focused on developing world models that can actually plan and reason. However, in the past year, Meta’s AI research groups have seen increasing tensions and mass layoffs as Zuckerberg has shifted the company’s AI strategy away from long-term research and toward the rapid deployment of commercial products.
Over the summer, Zuckerberg hired Alexander Wang to lead a new superintelligence team at Meta, paying $14.3 billion to hire the 28-year-old founder of data-labeling startup Scale AI and acquiring a 49 percent interest in his company. LeCun, who previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, now reports to Wang, which sounds like a sharp criticism of LeCun’s approach to AI.
Zuckerberg personally chose a special team called TBD Labs to accelerate the development of the next iteration of the big language model, luring employees from rivals like OpenAI and Google with surprisingly large $100 to $250 million pay packages. As a result, Zuckerberg has come under increasing pressure from Wall Street to show that his billion-dollar investment in becoming an AI leader will pay off and increase revenues. But if it turns out like his previous pivot to the metaverse, Zuckerberg’s latest gambit could prove equally costly and fruitless.