Yann LeCun Announces New AI Venture Without Meta's Financial Support

Yann LeCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Meta, is embarking on a new journey by launching his own AI-focused startup. Even though his soon-to-be previous employer will be collaborating with him, it will not participate in the funding.

In a LinkedIn post last month, LeCun revealed he will be departing from Meta after a long tenure of 12 years. His time at Meta included five years as the founding director of Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), a pivotal AI research division of Meta, followed by seven years as the leading AI scientist.

Yet, Meta's strategic reallocation of its AI resources this year has led to the emergence of the Superintelligence Lab, now under the leadership of Scale AI's founder, Alexandr Wang.

LeCun expressed his intention to further advance his research in Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) through his new startup, as he shared on LinkedIn in November. This initiative aims to create transformative AI technologies that possess the capability to interpret the physical world, exhibit long-term memory, reason effectively, and execute complex plans.

Though cutting some ties, Meta remains a strategic partner in LeCun's new initiative, albeit not an investor. At an AI-Pulse conference held in Paris, LeCun explained that Meta favors the prospective architectural developments he envisions, seeing them as possibly foundational for the future.

Unlike language-focused Large Language Models (LLMs), LeCun's goal is to devise systems making decisions and predictions based on abstract world representations. This vision extends past Meta's current interests, prompting LeCun and Zuckerberg to acknowledge the broad application potential that warrants independent pursuit.

Meta has now reoriented its focus towards superintelligence, a hypothesized AI form anticipated to match or exceed human cognitive abilities. In June, the Superintelligence Lab was inaugurated, which aligns with Zuckerberg's aim to cultivate AI systems capable of outperforming human intellect.

Requests for comments from both Meta and LeCun went unanswered when approached by Business Insider.