Meta's Chief Ai Scientist Is Leaving The Company After 12 Years

One of Meta's apical AI researchers, Yann LeCun, is leaving aft 12 years pinch nan institution to recovered his ain AI startup, he announced. LeCun, who is besides a professor astatine New York University, joined nan institution in 2013 to lead Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) laboratory and later took connected nan domiciled of Chief AI Scientist.

LeCun said his caller startup would "continue nan Advanced Machine Intelligence investigation programme (AMI) I person been pursuing complete nan past respective years pinch colleagues astatine FAIR, astatine NYU, and beyond" and that it would partner pinch Meta. "The extremity of nan startup is to bring astir nan adjacent large gyration successful AI: systems that understand nan beingness world, person persistent memory, tin reason, and tin scheme analyzable action sequences," he wrote successful an update connected Threads. "AMI will person far-ranging applications successful galore sectors of nan economy, immoderate of which overlap pinch Meta’s commercialized interests, but galore of which do not. Pursuing nan extremity of AMI successful an independent entity is simply a measurement to maximize its wide impact."

Speculation astir LeCun's early astatine Meta has been mounting successful caller months. Earlier this year, nan institution invested astir $15 cardinal into Scale AI and made nan 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, its Chief AI Officer. Meta besides recruited Shengjia Zhao, who helped create GPT-4, making him Chief AI Scientist of its recently created Meta Superintelligence Labs unit.

LeCun, connected nan different hand, has been openly skeptical of LLMs. "We are not going to get to human-level AI by conscionable scaling LLMs," he said during an appearance connected nan Big exertion podcast earlier this year. And successful a caller talk astatine a conference, he advised aspiring researchers to "absolutely not activity connected LLMs," according to remarks reported by The Wall Street Journal.

At nan aforesaid time, Meta has been reshuffling its AI teams. The institution trim "several hundred" jobs from its Superintelligence group, including from FAIR, last month. And LeCun has "had trouble getting resources for his projects astatine Meta arsenic nan institution focused much intently connected building models to compete pinch contiguous threats from rivals including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Anthropic," Bloomberg reported.

LeCun said he will enactment connected astatine Meta until nan extremity of nan year. "I americium highly grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of nan AMI programme complete nan past fewer years," he wrote.