Shares in Meta Platforms (META) short-circuited today after reports that its main AI guru is planning to leave the business.
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As reported by the Financial Times, Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is looking to depart and set up his own start-up venture in the coming months. Indeed, he is said to already be in talks to raise funds for his new business.
Meta and LeCun did not comment for the piece.
AI Pioneer
LeCun is a winner of the Turing Award, which is dubbed the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’, and considered a pioneer of modern AI.
If it is correct, then LeCun’s departure will be of concern to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and investors. Although in recent months it appears that LeCun has been somewhat sidelined as Meta looks to ramp up its AI offerings and better compete with rivals such as Alphabet (GOOGL)-owned Google and OpenAI.
As can be seen below, its Reality Labs, which looks at the future of computing, is struggling to make headway.
Zuckerberg has looked to focus on rolling out AI models more rapidly than before, thus pivoting away from LeCun’s Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab, also known as Fair.
Zuckerberg has also recruited Alexander Wang from Scale AI to head up Meta’s new superintelligence team. He’s also lured staff away from rivals such as Google.
Product Struggles
It is probably fair to say that Meta has struggled to make inroads into AI given the underperformance compared with rivals of its Llama 4 model and the lukewarm customer response to its chatbot.
It is understood that LeCun believes that the models sought by Zuckerberg won’t be able to plan and reason like humans. Instead he wants to focus on so-called world models where machines are powered by human-level intelligence. This could be the focus of his new venture.
Meta’s plans to ramp up its AI spend have also not gone down well with investors. Its recent pledge to spend $100 billion on AI next year sent its shares lower as investors worried whether the investment would pay off.
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