👨‍💻 Yann LeCun Is Leaving Meta

Meta's Chief AI Scientist and one of the pioneers of deep learning is leaving the company after 12 years. LeCun will depart Meta at the end of 2025 to launch his own startup. Meta will partner with the new project.

"The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences," the scientist said.

Ideologically, the new company will be the antithesis of the current LLM race. LeCun has publicly called LLMs a dead end that sucks up resources and is "dumber than cats," arguing they do not lead to human-level intelligence. His alternative is the JEPA architecture and "World Models": systems that understand physical laws and the surrounding environment.

💰 The failed release of Llama 4 this spring pushed Zuckerberg toward a harsh restructuring. He organized a new "Superintelligence Lab," poaching specialists from OpenAI, Google, and other companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. The new structure is headed by 28-year-old Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang.

Now, the company is betting on hardline product efficiency, moving away from the fundamental research strategy that LeCun represented.

💡 Furthermore, LeCun's departure marks the end of the open-source era at Meta. Zuckerberg is cautiously but clearly hinting that "superintelligence" will not be open.

@hiaimediaen