French computer engineer Yann LeCun, an artificial intelligence (AI) figure and head of AI research at Meta, announced on Facebook on Wednesday that he is leaving the American group at the end of 2025. The 65-year-old French researcher, who announced his departure a few days ago, indicated that he will launch his own startup, dedicated to the development of AI models capable of understanding the physical world.
It’s a turning page at Meta, where Yann LeCun spent 12 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.
“We won’t reach AGI with an LLM.”
Yann LeCun has been saying this for years. Now he leaves Meta to prove it.
LeCun invented convolutional neural networks—the technology behind every smartphone camera and driverless car today. He won the Turing Award in 2018, the Nobel Prize in AI.
On… pic.twitter.com/4zWOxzRjae
— Ask Perplexity (@AskPerplexity) November 18, 2025
He, among other things, recruited entrepreneur Alexandr Wang, co-founder of the startup Scale AI, whom he placed as head of a new entity called Superintelligence Labs, which brings together all the resources dedicated to AI. Head of AI research at Meta, Yann LeCun was integrated into this unit and placed under the responsibility of Alexandr Wang.
Beyond this hierarchical overhaul, the group has reoriented toward the development of large language models (LLM), the software on which AI interfaces like 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 goal of his new start-up venture is “to lead to the next great revolution in AI: systems capable of understanding the physical world, equipped with permanent memory, capable of thinking and designing complex actions,” the Frenchman wrote on Facebook.
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.
