Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun reportedly plans to leave to build his own startup

Meta may be about to lose one of its most renowned AI heads: Yann LeCun, the company’s chief AI scientist, plans to leave the company to found his own startup, the Financial Times reportedciting anonymous sources.

LeCun, professor at New York University, senior researcher at Meta, and winner of the prestigious AM Turing Awardplans to leave in the coming months, and is already in talks to raise capital for a startup that would focus on continuing its work on global models, the report said.

A world model is an AI system that develops an internal understanding of its environment so that it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios to predict outcomes. Top labs and startups such as Google DeepMind and World laboratories also develop world models.

LeCun’s departure would come at a crucial time for Meta, which has recently changed the way it approaches AI development in response to concerns about it being overtaken by rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

The company has reportedly started revamping its AI organization after hiring more than 50 engineers and researchers from its competitors to build out a new AI unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Meta invested $14.3 billion in data label supplier Scale AI in June and tapped CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the new division.

These decisions, sources told TechCrunch in August, have made things increasingly chaotic at Meta’s AI unit, with new talent expressing frustration with navigating the bureaucracy of a large company while Meta’s previous generative AI team saw its scope limited.

LeCun’s long-term research at the company under its Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR) division has been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decisions to overhaul things after the company’s previous family of AI models, Llama 4, failed to keep up with competing models. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research – techniques that can be used five to ten years from now.

LeCun has been open skeptical about how AI technology – specifically LLMs – is currently being marketed as the cure for all of humanity’s ills. Even him tweeted that AI systems still have a long way to go.

“It seems to me that before we ‘urgently figure out how to control AI systems much smarter than we are,’ we need to start with a design for a system that is smarter than a house cat,” he wrote.

Meta did not immediately return a request for comment outside regular business hours.