Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave the social media company to establish his own start-up, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Deep-learning pioneer LeCun is also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture, according to the report.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram has significantly increased its investments in AI and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganised the company’s AI initiatives under Superintelligence Labs.
Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labelling start-up Scale AI to lead the new AI effort. As a result, LeCun, who had reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang, the report said.
LeCun and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The company first invested in AI in 2013 when it launched the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit and recruited LeCun, who is a sceptic of the large language model path to superintelligence.
LeCun is also a silver professor of data science, computer science, neural science and electrical and computer engineering at New York University, according to his LinkedIn page.
He is known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional neural network, which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition.
LeCun, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their groundbreaking conceptual and engineering advancements in deep neural networks, which have become a cornerstone of modern computing and paved the way for the AI boom.
Big Tech companies have been spending billions of dollars building AI infrastructure for running machines that require massive computing power. Meta has pledged to invest $600bn in the US over the next three years.
Reuters
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