'Godfather Of AI' Yann LeCun Quits Meta

Professor Yann LeCun, widely regarded as one of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence, has announced his departure from Meta, where he served as chief AI scientist. LeCun, a Turing Award winner, spent over a decade at Meta, leading the company’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, which he described as his “proudest non-technical accomplishment”.

His exit comes just weeks after being honoured by King Charles at St James’s Palace for his contributions to AI. During his tenure, LeCun witnessed multiple AI developments, including the recent surge in generative AI following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT.

In posts on Threads, LeCun expressed gratitude to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and highlighted FAIR’s global impact on AI research and the tech community. He signalled that his next venture will focus on “advanced machine intelligence”, an approach inspired by how children and young animals learn, contrasting with the large language models (LLMs) that dominate generative AI today.