Meta may be losing one of its most prominent AI chiefs. Yann LeCun, the company’s chief AI scientist, plans to leave the company to launch his own startup, the Financial Times reported, citing anonymous sources.
LeCun, a professor at New York University, a senior research fellow at Meta, and a recipient of the prestigious AM Turing Award, plans to retire in the coming months and is already in talks to raise funding for a start-up company focused on continuing research into global models, the report added.
A world model is an AI system that develops an internal understanding of the environment and can simulate causal scenarios and predict outcomes. Top labs and startups such as Google DeepMind and World Labs are also developing world models.
LeCun’s departure comes at a pivotal time for Meta, which has recently changed its approach to AI development in response to concerns that it was being overtaken by rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
The company has reportedly begun revamping its AI organization after hiring more than 50 engineers and researchers from competitors to build a new AI division called Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL). Notably, Meta invested $14.3 billion in data label vendor Scale AI in June and hired CEO Alexandr Wang to run the new division.
Sources told TechCrunch in August that these decisions have made things even more chaotic for Meta’s AI division, with new talent expressing frustration navigating the bureaucracy of a large company while Meta’s previous generative AI team believed its scope was limited.
LeCun’s years of research work under the company’s Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR) division has been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to overhaul the company’s previous AI model family, Llama 4, after it failed to keep up with rival models. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research, i.e. technologies that may be used in 5-10 years.
tech crunch event
san francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
LeCun is openly skeptical about how AI technology, particularly LLM, is currently being touted as a cure for all human ailments. He even tweeted that AI systems have a long way to go.
“Before we can quickly find ways to control AI systems that are much smarter than we are, it seems like we need some inspiration for designing systems that are smarter than our cats,” he writes.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside of normal business hours.
