AI pioneer Yann LeCun leaves Meta to launch new AI start-up

The renowned French AI pioneer LeCun has officially announced he is leaving Meta to start his own machine learning company to compete in the AI race in a novel way.

He has clarified that he will leave his post as Meta’s chief artificial intelligence researcher at the end of the year.

He wrote on LinkedIn, “As many of you have heard through rumors on recent media articles, I am planning to leave Meta after 12 years: 5 years as founding director of FAIR and 7 years as Chief AI Scientist.”

LeCun was of the view that large language models (LLMs) that support generative AI such as ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama are restricted and cannot lead to real computer intelligence, despite significant investment.

He has a firm belief that real computer intelligence can be achieved from world models, which can be learned with visual data such as watching videos.

On the contrary, it is better to forecast the next word, as LLMs do; they predict what word happens next and how things progress with time.

According to LeCun, the prime motive of the new start-up was to bring out the pivotal revolution in AI and to create systems that better understand the real world and can plan to handle complex action effectively.

He extends his gratitude towards Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives' previous interest in AM. Meta will be a partner in the new company, but he did not specify the actual nature of the partnership.

No doubt, Meta serves as one of the most prominent figures in AI, prioritizing core research over current commercial trends, and ultimately leading to the creation of new models.

In addition, AI systems can be the prime means by which to understand the physical world, which he views as the crucial path to truly intelligent AI.