Yann LeCun leaving Meta to launch AI start-up focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence

Yann LeCun, one of the founding figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at Meta Platforms, said on Wednesday he plans to leave the company at the end of the year to launch a new AI start-up.

LeCun has been a key part of Meta’s AI ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders.

Over 12 years, he served five as FAIR’s founding director and seven as the company’s chief AI scientist, guiding breakthroughs in deep learning, computer vision and large-scale language modelling that underpin products like Instagram recommendations and Meta’s generative AI systems.

He developed an early form of an artificial neural network that mimicked how the human eye and brain process images – technology that later became the backbone of modern image recognition and GenAI.

LeCun, 65, said his new venture would pursue Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research – a project he has developed in collaboration with colleagues at FAIR and New York University, where he teaches.

The computer scientist said he would provide more details about his new firm at a later date, but added that Meta would be a partner in the venture, reflecting what he called the company’s “continued interest and support” for AMI’s long-term goals.