What AI pioneer Yann LeCun will likely build after departing Meta

"Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer who has led Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division since 2013, will reportedly leave that post to start his own AI research lab. LeCun plans to depart in the coming months, and has begun early fundraising discussions to support his new venture, the reports say. The new startup will focus on building "world models," or AI systems that learn from images, video, and spatial data instead of relying solely on text and large language models."

"After developing open-source Llama models that fell behind other LLMs, Meta has gone on a very lavish recruiting spree to hire world-class researchers for a new effort to build state-of-the-art models. Meta's newest models, sources say, are likely to be closed-source, and are expected to follow the same general architecture and training methods used by rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic."

"In other words, they will continue relying on the same transformer architecture invented at Google in 2017 (which kicked off the generative AI boom) while continually using more training data and computing power to achieve intelligence gains. LeCun has been critical of that approach, and doubts that it has produced AI that truly reasons, rather than just detects patterns and predicts the next word or pixel in a sequence."

Yann LeCun will leave Meta's FAIR division to start an AI research lab and has begun early fundraising discussions. The new startup will focus on building "world models" that learn from images, video, and spatial data rather than relying solely on text and large language models. Meta developed open-source Llama models that fell behind other LLMs and then pursued aggressive recruiting to build state-of-the-art models. Meta's newest models are likely to be closed-source and expected to follow the transformer architecture and scaling training methods used by rivals. LeCun criticizes that scaling approach and doubts it yields genuine reasoning, arguing it mainly detects patterns and predicts the next word or pixel in a sequence.

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