Thomas Unise
Renowned AI pioneer Yann LeCun recently revealed the reasons behind his abrupt departure from Meta in November, primarily citing tensions with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and frustrations about reporting to 29-year-old Alexandr Wang.
LeCun’s Meta Journey and the ChatGPT Effect
LeCun served as Meta’s chief AI scientist for over a decade, enjoying the freedom to conduct esoteric AI research without profit-driven constraints. He described his early days at the company as a “tabula rasa with a carte blanche” where “money was clearly not going to be a problem.”
However, the landscape shifted dramatically after ChatGPT’s release in November 2022. Zuckerberg pushed LeCun to develop Meta’s own large language model (LLM), which LeCun agreed to do under the condition that Llama would be open-source and free.
Diverging Visions for AI’s Future
While early Llama models were successful and “changed the entire industry,” the latest Llama 4 release was widely considered a failure. LeCun attributes this to Zuckerberg’s pressure to accelerate development at the expense of innovation: “We had a lot of new ideas and really cool stuff that they should implement. But they were just going for things that were essentially safe and proved. When you do this, you fall behind.”
The fundamental disagreement extends to AI’s future direction. LeCun views LLMs as a “dead end” for achieving superintelligence, advocating instead for “world models” that understand the physical world beyond just language. Despite Zuckerberg supposedly appreciating LeCun’s research direction, investment priorities went elsewhere.
The Wang Factor: A Hierarchical Shift
The breaking point came when Zuckerberg launched a new LLM-focused Superintelligence Labs separate from LeCun’s team. He hired Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, to lead this initiative after investing $14 billion for a 49% stake in Wang’s company.
This reorganization meant LeCun, a founding figure in AI with decades of experience, would report to the 29-year-old Wang, whom LeCun described as “young” and “inexperienced.” When pressed about this new reporting structure, LeCun’s frustration was evident: “Alex isn’t telling me what to do either. You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
LeCun’s Next Chapter
Moving forward, LeCun has founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, a startup focused on world models with a targeted $3 billion valuation. As executive chairman, LeCun aims to recapture the research freedom he once enjoyed at Meta while pursuing his vision for the next generation of AI.
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