Meta’s Chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to move on after 12 years

Yann LeCun has said he will be starting a company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research programme

French-American computer scientist Yann LeCun has decided to move out of Meta after an over 12-year stint.

Yann LeCun was the Chief AI scientist at Meta. He is now planning to start a company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research programme.

LeCun will continue to be with Meta till the end of this year.

In a social media post, he wrote: “As many of you have heard through rumors or recent media articles, I am planning to leave Meta after 12 fantastic years: 5 years as founding director of FAIR and 7 years as Chief AI Scientist.”

The impact of FAIR on the company, on the field of AI, on the tech community, and on the wider world has been spectacular. The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment.

I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond. 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.

I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of the AMI program over the last few years. Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company.

As I envision it, AMI will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not. Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact.

I will give some more details about the new company when the time comes. In the meantime, I’m sticking around Meta until the end of the year.