Meta’s (META) chief AI scientist and the founding director of the FAIR lab, Yann LeCun, is leaving the company at the end of 2025, according to an official memo posted on his LinkedIn account late on Wednesday.
LeCun, who has been with the social media and tech giant for 12 years, said he plans to start a new company and will partner with Meta and give it access to its innovations.
In his public post, LeCun said he is going to create a startup company to continue the “Advanced Machine Intelligence” research program he has been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at New York University, and other places.
“The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences,” LeCun said.
The announcement of LeCun’s departure also comes amid a major C-suite rejig at Meta, which saw the exit of revenue chief John Hegeman and Clara Shih, the head of Business AI.
LeCun’s job at the Mark Zuckerberg-led company focused on long-term AI research, which won’t play a part in shaping consumer experiences in the near future. According to sources who spoke to Bloomberg, LeCun had difficulty getting resources for his projects as Meta focused more intently on building models to compete with immediate threats from rivals including OpenAI (OPENAI), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), and Anthropic PBC (ANTHRO).
After concluding Meta had fallen behind key rivals, Zuckerberg shifted his focus away from the research efforts of FAIR and toward faster deployment of AI models and products. Over the summer, he brought in Alexandr Wang to run a new “superintelligence” division, spending $14.3B to hire the 28-year-old Scale AI founder and acquire a 49% stake in his company.
In October, the company laid off 600 employees in its AI division but retained top talent to increase efficiency and offset the impact of its aggressive capital spending on building critical AI infrastructure.