Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP via Getty Images.
- Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is leaving to launch an AI startup.
- LeCun said he plans to develop advanced machine intelligence beyond Meta's current research scope.
- LeCun said Meta will partner with the startup but will not provide direct financial backing.
Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun is leaving Big Tech for a new, riskier bet. And while his soon-to-be former company will be a partner, it won't be an investor.
Last Month, LeCun announced on LinkedIn that he was leaving Meta after 12 years. He spent five of those years as the founding director of Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR, which was once Meta's primary AI research lab, and seven years as the company's chief AI scientist.
Meta, however, this year reorganized its AI department around what it calls its Superintelligence Lab, headed by the Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.
"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," LeCun wrote on LinkedIn in November. "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."
He isn't severing ties with Meta completely, however. During a talk at the AI-Pulse event in Paris on Thursday, LeCun said that Meta will be a partner of his new endeavor, though not an investor.
"This new architecture is a project that Mark Zuckerberg really likes. He thinks maybe that's the future," LeCun said of his ambition to build world models, advanced machine learning systems that help humans make decisions and predictions from abstract representations of the world. That's different than the LLMs that underpin the most prominent AI chatbots, which rely only on language.
These ambitions stretched beyond Meta's purview, he said.
"He and I both realized that the potential spectrum of applications of this was kind of beyond what Meta was interested in," he said, referring to Zuckerberg.
"The number of applications is so, so, so wide that it was better to do it as an independent entity."
Meta's AI ambitions have shifted more toward superintelligence, a still-theoretical form of AI that can reason as well as, or better than, humans.
The company established its Superintelligence Lab in June. Zuckerberg said he hopes it'll help the company build "personal superintelligence," a term he uses to describe AI systems that could eventually surpass human capabilities.
Neither Meta nor LeCun responded to requests for comment from Business Insider.