After 12 years at Meta Platforms Inc. the artificial intelligence visionary Yann LeCun is out the door and about to embark on a mission to be part of what he calls the next big revolution in AI.

Known as one of the godfathers of AI, LeCun (pictured) left France decades ago to work at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 2013, he joined what was then Facebook Inc. to work at the Fundamental AI Research or FAIR lab, later becoming the company’s chief AI scientist.

Following a recent shakeup at Meta as the company attempts to catch up with competitors in AI, a handful of AI researchers left. LeCun hasn’t yet publicly expressed whether the reported chaotic environment at Meta was a factor in his departure. However, a report in Bloomberg said that LeCun had “clashed with others internally.”

In an effort to catch up with the likes of OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC, and Google LLC, Meta poured $15 billion into Scale AI, making Alexandr Wang its chief AI officer. Weeks later, the company brought in Shengjia Zhao – a key contributor to the development of Open AI’s GPT-4 – naming him chief AI scientist for the newly established Meta Superintelligence Labs division. At the same time, some of the senior FAIR directors were laid off when Meta cut 600 Jobs at Superintelligence Labs.

Somewhere during the maelstrom, LeCun opted out, perhaps related to his belief that large language models are not the future of superintelligence. Nonetheless, he said Meta will partner with his new startup, where he will focus on creating advanced machine intelligence. He believes that for AI to become superintelligent, it must understand the natural world, whereas LLMs only understand as much as the data they are trained on.

“I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program, AMI, I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.”

He added that his startup will have “far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not.”

Photo: Flickr