Bloomberg has confirmed the rumors that Yann LeCun, one of the Godfathers of AI and Turing Award Winner, is leaving Facebook/Meta and starting his own AI startup, focused on World Models.
Bloomberg -> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-19/meta-ai-s-lecun-to-announce-exit-startup-as-soon-as-this-week
The interesting twist is that Facebook/Meta say that it will be partnering with Yann LeCun on his new startup.
The information is also sharing details -> Yann LeCun to Leave Meta to Form New AI Startup — The Information
Thoughts on Yann LeCun leaving Facebook and starting his own AI startup focused on World Models
There are so many interesting things to think about
- Lots of people leaving Facebook.
- Former Yann LeCun student and PyTorch co-founder Chintala also left Facebook (for Thinking Machines Lab)
- Yann LeCun leaving Facebook/Meta is a massive loss. Worth far more than the AI researchers Zuckerberg has been handing $100 million a year contracts to
- Yann LeCun leaving might have included these four aspects
- New AI researchers being given insane salaries at Facebook AI Labs
- Pretty sure that makes the existing AI researchers think they could make a lot by leaving for somewhere else
- Facebook being quite far behind in AI
- Yann LeCun (rightly, in my opinion) thinking LLMs have hit a wall and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is not going to happen via LLMs
- It’s very interesting that all the researchers in AI think AGI is not imminent and feel that LLMs are not the path to AGI
- Meanwhile, all the startups CTOs and CEOs are promising AGI within 1 to 3 years, and are pretending LLMs will make that happen
- Alexander Wang, a college dropout with almost no actual AI research expertise, being made head of AI at Facebook
- Researchers find it hard to respect someone without a quality education
- Even PhDs would find it hard to work under someone like Wang who has no actual AI expertise. Imagine telling one of the Godfathers of AI that his new boss is a Dude who is good at outsourcing data labeling jobs
- New AI researchers being given insane salaries at Facebook AI Labs
- For anyone with even basic knowledge of Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Computer Science, it is pretty clear that Machine Learning is very unlikely to be The Path to Artificial General Intelligence.
- Ditto for Super Intelligence – LLMs are extremely unlikely to lead us to either AGI or Super Intelligence
- You can’t just Brute Force AGI
- The fact that the AI Bubble is pushing LLMs and massive investment into LLMs as ‘the one true path’ has got to be vexing for one of the Godfathers of AI
- Ditto for Super Intelligence – LLMs are extremely unlikely to lead us to either AGI or Super Intelligence
- Fundamentally, there is always a clash between the actual researchers in a field, and the ‘exploiters’ who want to commercialize the technology
- That is perhaps why we are seeing a lot of the serious AI researchers shifting to companies such as Safe Super Intelligence (Ilya) and Thinking Machines Lab (Mira Murati)
- It should be very unsurprising that Yann LeCun is leaving Facebook.
- Prof. Hinton left Google in 2023 and we will see nearly all the big AI researchers leave the ‘exploiter’ companies for actual AI research labs or companies that have an extremely strong moral compass
It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens at Facebook. Meta/Facebook has survived by buying Instagram right before it blew up (for $1 Billion) and Whatsapp after it became big (for $19 Billion). It has also done a good job of cloning successful companies and moving fast.
Without smart acquisitions (especially Instagram and Whatsapp) and fast ‘stealing of ideas’/cloning Facebook aka Meta would be gone. Now with AI Facebook aka Meta faces another existential crisis.
AI presents a Huge challenge to the large technology companies.
OpenAI and Anthropic are of a size and potential where Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk cannot just buy them. So the strategy (which I discuss in a separate post) is to just acquire as many ultra talented AI researchers as they can, and hope magic happens.
Zuckerberg is doing this with Facebook AI Labs/Meta AI Labs.
Elon Musk is doing this with xAI.
Bezos is doing this with Prometheus AI.
Seeing one of the Godfathers of AI walk away from Facebook is a stark reminder of how difficult it is for the large technology companies to navigate AI. Your most valuable assets are walking away and even $100 million a year salaries are not enough to keep them.
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