According to the Financial Times, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, is planning to leave the company to start his own startup, focusing on continuing his research on world models. LeCun is not only a senior researcher at Meta but also a professor at New York University and has received the prestigious Turing Award.

A world model is an AI system designed to build an internal understanding of the environment, simulating causal relationships to predict outcomes. Currently, many top laboratories and startups, such as Google DeepMind and World Labs, are developing similar world models. LeCun's departure comes as Meta undergoes significant changes in its AI development strategy, especially under pressure from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

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Recently, Meta began restructuring its AI organization, hiring over 50 engineers and researchers from competitors and establishing a new AI department - the Meta Super Intelligence Lab (MSL). In this context, Meta invested $1.43 billion in data annotation supplier Scale AI in June and brought in Alexander Wang, the CEO of Scale AI, to lead operations in the new department.

Although Meta is actively bringing in new talent, this has led to increasing chaos within its AI department, with new employees becoming frustrated by the complex processes of such a large company. At the same time, Meta's previous generative AI team has been restricted, with their work scope being reduced. LeCun's long-term research work in Meta's fundamental AI research laboratory (FAIR) has gradually been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decisions. Zuckerberg aims to make up for Meta's shortcomings in AI models, especially after Llama4 failed to compete with rival models.

LeCun has expressed skepticism about the current promotion of AI technology in the market, especially large language models (LLMs). He stated on social media that AI systems still have a long way to go. He believes that before we can "urgently solve how to control AI systems smarter than us," we need to have an initial idea of designing systems that are smarter than a house cat.

Meta has not yet responded to this news.

Key Points:  

🌟 Yann LeCun plans to leave Meta and start a new company focused on world models.  

🔍 Meta is restructuring its AI department to cope with competitive pressures.  

🤖 LeCun is skeptical about the current AI technology promotion, believing it still needs further development