In a new interview with The Financial Times, Yann LeCun, one of the so-called godfathers of AI, finally dished on his abrupt exit from Meta in November.
From how he tells it, most of it boils down to his increasingly fraught relationship with CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and his new golden boy, Alexandr Wang, who ended up bossing LeCun around even though he’s nearly four decades younger.
LeCun had been at Zuckerberg’s company for over a decade, where, as chief AI scientist, he had the freedom to carry out all kinds of esoteric AI research without necessarily having to worry about developing a profitable product. LeCun described Meta, then Facebook, as a “tabula rasa with a carte blanche.” “Money was clearly not going to be a problem,” he told the FT.
Then, in November 2022, ChatGPT came out, and the whole world went bananas for AI chatbots. AI chatbots and their human-like capabilities for conversation are powered by large language models, something LeCun helped pioneer with his foundational work on neural networks. When Zuckerberg ordered LeCun develop Meta’s own LLM, he agreed under the condition that Llama would be open source and free.
The Llama models “changed the entire industry,” LeCun said, and were a hit with AI researchers because of their power and open source nature.
The success didn’t last, though; the latest Llama 4 model, released last April, was dead on arrival and reviled as an instantly-outdated flop. LeCun blames the failure on Zuckerberg pressuring LeCun’s unit to accelerate AI development.
“We had a lot of new ideas and really cool stuff that they should implement. But they were just going for things that were essentially safe and proved,” LeCun told the FT. “When you do this, you fall behind.”
The rift, however, goes deeper. LeCun views LLMs as a “dead end” for building even more powerful, “superintelligent” models that rival or surpass human capabilities. An entirely different architecture called “world models” which seek to understand the physical world, not just language, is needed to make the next major leap in the tech.
According to LeCun, Zuckerberg actually liked LeCun’s world model research, but didn’t put his money where his mouth is. Instead, Zuckerberg launched a new LLM-focused Superintelligence Labs last year, separate from LeCun’s lab, and offered several hundred million dollar contracts to attract top talent. All the talent that came in, LeCun complained, have been “completely LLM-pilled.”
Zuckerberg’s marquee new-hire was Alexandr Wang, the founder and former CEO of the AI data annotation startup Scale AI, which provides an essential service for training AI models, but doesn’t build or design them. Zuckerberg poured $14 billion into Scale AI to buy a 49 percent stake and, as part of that deal, Wang left and joined Meta to lead the new Superintelligence Labs. As a consequence, LeCun was forced to start reporting to Wang.
The move raised questions from the get-go, including whether Wang, 29, had the experience and background to build massive AI models, something his company didn’t do. LeCun doesn’t leave us wondering where he stands on Wang’s hiring, calling him “young” and “inexperienced.”
Be that as it may, LeCun, considered to be a godfather of the entire field, was now taking orders from Wang. LeCun seemed cool about this at first when the interviewer brought up the new hierarchy. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27,” Lecun told the FT. “I was twice the age of the average engineer.”
But when the interviewer pointed out that the younger generation weren’t telling him what to do until the 29-year-old Wang showed up, LeCun seemingly let his true feelings be known.
“Alex isn’t telling me what to do either,” LeCun sneered. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
He’ll be his own boss going forward. LeCun has launched a new world-model-focused startup called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which is targeting a $3 billion valuation. LeCun will serve as executive chairman, allowing him a similar degree of freedom to pursue research he once enjoyed at Meta, according to the FT.
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