Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Plans Exit To Kickstart New Startup

Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun will be leaving the company to kickstart his own venture, according to a report from the Financial Times on Tuesday.

The report, which cited those in the know, stated that LeCun was also exploring avenues and having discussions with potentially interested parties to raise capital for his startup.

LeCun was hired by Meta as it was expanding its business operations beyond its flasghip social media companies Facebook and Instagram.

He joined the company in 2013 as a part of its Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research unit. Referred to as the 'Godfather of AI', LeCun shares the moniker with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, with all three of them jointly winning the Turing award in 2018, due to their research on deep learning.

Meta repurposed its AI unit into Meta Superintelligence Lab in June 2025, hiring Scale AI cofounder Alexandr Wang to head it as Chief AI Officer, which led to Le Cun reporting to him instead of Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox.

With Wang at the helm, Meta had made its priorities clear as it switched focus to the large language model format of AI compute, which Le Cun has been publicly critical of.

LeCunn believes in the 'world model', which involves the AI generating and simulating scenarios to determine the outcome using real-world logic, making it develop a form of 'common sense' that current AI models lack.

Wang differed from him, as he focused on scaling large language models rapidly in order to put out AI products quickly for public consumption.

LeCunn has stated that this approach will not help AI reach true 'Artificial General Intelligence'.

Wang's methodology was likely seen as more commercially viable for Meta to drive its profit margin, thus leading to his hiring after the company purchased 49% stake in his startup 'Scale AI'.

Yann LeCun is also a Silver Professor at New York University, with specialization in the fields of data science, computer science, neural science and electrical and computer engineering.