He announced his departure from Meta… on the Meta platform. In a message published on Facebook on Wednesday evening, November 19, French computer engineer Yann LeCun, an artificial intelligence (AI) figure and head of AI research at Marck Zuckerberg’s company, announced his official departure at the end of the year. The 65-year-old French researcher confirmed that he will launch his own startup, dedicated to developing AI models capable of understanding the physical world.
It’s a turning page at Meta, where Yann LeCun spent twelve years as head of Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab. Until this year, this was a manifestation of the extensive work Meta had done in the field of AI. But in recent months, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has decided to shift artificial intelligence development within his group and embarked on a major recruitment campaign. LeCun found himself led by a newcomer.
But beyond this hierarchical overhaul, the group has reoriented towards the development of large language models (LLM), the software on which AI interfaces such as ChatGPT or Gemini are built. However, Yann LeCun often criticizes these models, considering them limited and incapable of bringing AI to decisive milestones.
He believes more in models based on image and video absorption, which allows them to gain an understanding of how the real world works. Such advances will pave the way for new applications, particularly in the field of robotics, with machines now capable of handling unprogrammed situations.
The object of his new start-up work is “to lead to the next big revolution in AI : a system capable of understanding the physical world, equipped with permanent memory, capable of thinking and designing complex actions”LeCun wrote on Facebook. The latter provides “Very varied applications in many economic sectors”.
However, the man from France does not seem to have a bad relationship with Marc Zuckerberg, as evidenced by his message published on Facebook, accompanied by a photo of the two men having a full discussion. He also mentioned his new box “future partnership with Meta”.
Arriving in 2013 at Facebook, which later became Meta, Yann LeCun is known for his work on neural networks, an evolutionary architecture that allows an algorithm to recognize trends and adjust itself, without human intervention. In 2018, Le Francilien received the Turing Prize, awarded jointly to Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, which is considered the equivalent of the Nobel in computer science.
