I=6
Yann LeCun confirms that he’s leaving Meta to start his own startup which Meta will be a partner
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Meta’s Chief AI Scientist for FAIR confirmed in a Facebook post that he’s leaving the company to start his own startup which will continue the work he did at Meta.
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LeCun said Meta will be a partner in his startup company.
"I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond. 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, " he wrote.
“Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company,” he added.
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LeCun has been outspoken that Meta and other companies are wrong to focus on large language models (LLMs), saying the models might never reach human-level intelligence.
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LeCun was also a key supporter of open-source models, an approach that Meta has publicly shifted away from.
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LeCun’s open criticism of Meta’s AI strategy meant he clashed with others internally, and several employees sought to keep him out of the spotlight, Bloomberg reported citing people at Meta.
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Financial Times reported last week about the planned departure.
Assessment
With LeCun’s departure, Meta’s focus on TBD labs (lab in charge of LLMs), and Meta’s plan to partner with LeCun, I think Meta might shut down FAIR. FAIR has around 1,000 employees (Meta AI Team-Notion).