Overview
- LeCun announced he will depart at the end of the year after 12 years at Meta, where he co-founded the FAIR research lab and served as chief AI scientist.
- His new startup will pursue world-model approaches that learn from visual and sensory data to enable reasoning, persistent memory, and planning.
- Meta confirmed it will be a partner of the venture and will have access to its innovations, though terms and funding details were not disclosed.
- The move follows Meta’s shift toward large language models, a new Superintelligence Labs unit led by Alexandr Wang, a major investment in Scale AI, and roughly 600 AI layoffs in October.
- Reporting describes internal tensions over resources and strategy as Meta prioritized LLMs and a more closed approach, while LeCun championed long-horizon research and open-source work.