Yann LeCun is clear on his life goals — and being a leader is not one of them.
“I can do management, but I don’t like doing it,” Meta’s former chief AI scientist said in an interview with MIT Technology Review published on Thursday.
“I kind of hated being a director,” he said about his time at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), a leading AI research lab he founded. “I am not good at this career management thing. I’m much more visionary and a scientist.”
He said his “mission in life” was not leadership, but to accelerate technological progress and inspire others to work on what interests them.
In November, LeCun announced his departure from Meta, where he had worked for 12 years, and said he would launch his own AI company.
His new startup, AMI Labs, focuses on building world models — a type of AI that closely reflects the real world. The Paris-based startup will work on open source solutions and be among the few frontier AI labs that he said are “neither Chinese nor American.”
LeCun said that he would take on the role of executive chairman, while Alex LeBrun, his former colleague from Meta AI, will be the company’s CEO. LeCun will continue teaching at NYU.
‘No experience with research’
In the MIT interview, the AI pioneer said that he did not agree with all the choices Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made, such as letting go the robotics team inside FAIR.
Earlier this month, he criticized the leadership of another Meta exec, Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data labelling startup Scale AI. Meta invested $14.3 billion in the buzzy startup, which included hiring Wang to lead AI progress.
“There’s no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher,” LeCun said in an interview with the Financial Times.
LeCun said that even though the 28-year-old was briefly his boss after Zuckerberg’s AI reorg, he wasn’t taking orders from Wang.
“You don’t tell a researcher what to do,” LeCun said. “You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
He also made similar remarks about being a visionary instead of a leader in the FT interview.
“I’m pretty good at guessing what type of technology will work or not. But I can’t be a CEO,” LeCun, 65, said. “I’m both too disorganized for this, and also too old.”
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