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Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social media giant to found his own start-up, as Mark Zuckerberg seeks to radically overhaul the company’s AI operations.

LeCun, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the pioneers of modern AI, has told associates he will leave the Silicon Valley group in the coming months, according to people familiar with the conversations.


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The French-US scientist is also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture, one of the people said. LeCun declined to comment. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The impending departure comes as Meta’s founder shakes up its AI strategy in order to challenge rivals such as OpenAI and Google in developing more powerful forms of AI.

Zuckerberg has pivoted away from the longer-term research work of Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab (Fair), which LeCun has headed since 2013, to focus on more rapidly rolling out models and AI products after deciding that Meta had fallen behind the competition.

Over the summer, Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang to lead a new “superintelligence” team at Meta, paying $14.3bn to hire the 28-year-old founder of data-labelling start-up Scale AI and acquire a 49 per cent interest in his company.