Yann LeCun leaves Meta, yet Meta keeps access to his new startup’s AI breakthroughs
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is leaving the company. After months of speculation about his potential exit, LeCun has finally made it official that he will be walking away from Meta to create a new independent startup. However, even after leaving, he will continue to work with Meta through a partnership with his new venture.
After several weeks of rumors and speculation about the possible exit of Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun has finally made things official. Known as one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence, LeCun is officially leaving Meta after 12 years, and will now work on his new independent startup that will work on bringing about “the next big revolution in AI.” His exit is a significant one as he was among the first AI visionaries to join Facebook and helped shape Mark Zuckerberg’s early ambitions for AI.
The 65-year-old scientist announced his departure in a detailed post on Wednesday, capping a discussion sparked by Meta’s internal restructuring and recent layoffs affecting about 600 employees in its AI teams. LeCun, who spent five years as founding director of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and seven years as Meta’s chief AI scientist, said he will remain with the company until the end of the year.
In his announcement shared on Facebook and LinkedIn, LeCun said he is stepping down to focus on a new independent startup built around the Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research program — a long-running initiative he has led with FAIR, NYU, and international partners. The startup aims to build the next wave of AI systems capable of understanding the physical world, forming persistent memories, reasoning about complex situations, and planning long action sequences.
“I’m creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I’ve been leading for the past several years with colleagues at FAIR, NYU, and beyond. The goal of the startup is to drive the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and plan complex task sequences,” LeCun wrote in his post.
Meta is part of his new startup
Despite his massive exit from Meta, LeCun is not cutting ties with the company. Instead, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company will remain a strategic partner for his new venture. LeCun said that some AMI research may overlap with Meta’s commercial ambitions, while other parts will remain purely exploratory. “I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR and the AMI program over the past few years. Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company,” he wrote.
This arrangement means Meta will continue to benefit from future breakthroughs coming from LeCun’s new AI lab. Indeed, Meta may have lost its chief AI scientist, but it keeps a direct pipeline to the innovations that have shaped his tenure.
LeCun’s departure also marks a key moment for Meta’s AI strategy. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg invested $14.5 billion in Scale AI and appointed its CEO Alexander Wang as Meta’s new chief AI officer. This move placed LeCun under Wang’s supervision in the newly created Superintelligence Labs unit. This reshuffle sparked debate among researchers about META’s changing priorities. The lackluster reception to Meta’s Lama 4 model has reportedly intensified the company’s pressure to refocus on aggressive commercialization and faster product cycles, a direction contrary to LeCun’s long-term, fundamental research philosophy.
However, with his exit, while Meta will still benefit from the AI breakthroughs developed by LeCun’s new startup, the godfather of modern AI will now firmly hold the reins and be free to run his new company according to his vision.
