French computer engineer Yann LeCun announced, Wednesday November 19, on Facebook, his departure at the end of 2025 from the American group Meta. A figure in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and head of AI research at the company, the 65-year-old researcher plans to launch his own startup, dedicated to the development of AI models capable of understanding the physical world.
Arriving in 2013 at Facebook, which later became Meta, he spent twelve years as head of Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (Exhibit) laboratory. Until this year, this was the embodiment of the work carried out by Mark Zuckerberg’s group in the field of AI.
Known for his work on neural networks – evolutionary architectures that allow algorithms to recognize trends and adjust themselves, without human intervention – Ile-de-France received, in 2018, the Turing Prize, awarded jointly to Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, which is considered the equivalent of the Nobel in computer science.
In recent months, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has decided to direct AI development within his group and embarked on a major recruitment campaign. 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. Yann LeCun has been integrated into this unit and placed under the responsibility of Alexandr Wang.
“Leading the next big AI revolution”
However, in addition to a simple 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 criticized them, considering them limited and incapable of bringing AI to decisive achievements.
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, where machines are able to handle situations for which they have not been programmed.
The goal of Yann LeCun’s new start-up work 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.
