AI pioneer Yann LeCun isn’t sold on Mark Zuckerberg’s $14 billion bet on Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old Scale AI cofounder recruited to lead Meta’s Super Intelligence Lab.
In a new interview with the Financial Times, Lecun, who was Meta’s chief AI scientist before announcing in November that he was leaving to form his own startup, said Wang was “inexperienced” and didn’t fully understand AI researchers.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . 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.
Wang was the crown jewel of Zuckerberg’s aggressive moves in the AI talent war. Meta made a $14 billion investment in Scale AI, which included hiring Wang from the buzzy startup.
LeCun said that Zuckerberg grew frustrated after disappointing progress on Llama, the company’s flagship, open-sourced AI model.
In the interview, LeCun said that the AI team “fudged” some of the results of Llama 4. At the time, Meta was criticized for potentially gaming the results of benchmark tests. LeCun said the episode soured Zuckerberg on Meta’s existing AI team.
“Mark was really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved in this,” he told FT. “And so basically sidelined the entire GenAI organisation.”
As for his relationship with Wang, LeCun said that even though the 28-year-old was briefly his boss after Zuckerberg’s AI reorg, he wasn’t really directing him.
“You don’t tell a researcher what to do,” LeCun told the publication. “You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
Meta’s new AI team is ‘completely LLM-pilled’
LeCun said Zuckerberg remained supportive of his views on the future of AI, but that the Meta CEO’s larger hires are focused on large language model development.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence,” LeCun said. “But I’m not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. My integrity as a scientist cannot allow me to do this.”
LeCun has repeatedly argued that LLMs are too limited and that to unlock the true power of AI, a different approach is needed. It’s why his startup is reportedly called Advanced Machine Intelligence, the very approach he has argued is better suited than LLMs.
He will serve as executive chair, not as CEO, of the new company.
“I’m a scientist, a visionary. I can inspire people to work on interesting things. I’m pretty good at guessing what type of technology will work or not. But I can’t be a CEO,” LeCun said. “I’m both too disorganised for this, and also too old!”
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