Meta’s chief AI scientist, Jan LeCun, has confirmed rumors that he is leaving the company to start a new AI project. He doesn’t like the current state of the technology and believes that AGI is impossible to achieve at this rate.
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Jan LeCun, has confirmed rumors that he is leaving the company to start a new AI project. He doesn’t like the current state of the technology and believes that AGI is impossible to achieve at this rate.
LeCun announced his decision on Facebook, where he noted that he is creating a startup that will explore «world models» of artificial intelligence. Meta will collaborate with LeCun on his new project, Business Insider reports .
«I am creating a startup company to continue the research program in the field of advanced machine intelligence, on which I have been working for the past few years together with colleagues at FAIR, New York University and other institutions. The goal of the startup is to realize the next great revolution in the field of artificial intelligence: to create systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, and are able to reason and plan complex sequences of actions,» the scientist noted.
LeCun’s departure comes at a time of instability within Meta’s AI team. In the past few months, Meta has hired dozens of top researchers and engineers from competing companies and reorganized its AI operations under a new division, Superintelligence Labs.
LeCun has been an outspoken critic of overreliance on large language models, instead championing his approach, which teaches AI to understand and predict the physical world based on images and sensory data, rather than generating text.
«LLMs are great, they’re useful, we should invest in them — a lot of people will use them. They’re not the path to human-level intelligence. They’re just not. Right now they suck the air out of the room wherever they go — and so there’s essentially no resources left for anything else. So for the next revolution, we need to take a step back and figure out what’s missing from the current approaches,» said Yann LeCun, effectively criticizing his own employer.
LeCun believes his vision of AI will have broad applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which «intersect with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not.» He added that he will continue to work at the company until the end of the year before focusing on his startup.
