Yann LeCun, a leading figure in artificial intelligence and Meta's chief AI scientist, announced on Wednesday that he will leave the company at the end of the year to start a new AI venture.
LeCun, 65, plans to focus on Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a field aimed at creating AI systems that can reason, remember, and plan complex actions.
LeCun has been a driving force behind Meta's AI research for over a decade. According to Reuters, he joined Facebook in 2013 to establish Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which later became Meta's flagship AI lab.
Over 12 years, he served five years as FAIR's founding director and seven years as Meta's chief AI scientist.
His work helped lay the foundation for key technologies in deep learning, computer vision, and large-scale language modeling, powering products like Instagram recommendations and Meta's generative AI tools.
"The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment," LeCun wrote in his announcement. "The impact of FAIR on Meta, the AI field, and the wider world has been spectacular."
wow. Finally Yann Lecun just officially posted on his FB, an hour before, that he’s leaving Meta and launching a startup.
— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) November 19, 2025
To continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI).
And that he will be "sticking around Meta until the end of the year." pic.twitter.com/7EXYTRoWZB
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Yann LeCun Targets AI That Can Think, Remember, and Plan
LeCun's new venture will explore areas of AI that he describes as "advanced forms of intelligence," going beyond today's chatbots and large language models, AP News reported.
He said the research will focus on AI that can understand the physical world, retain memory over time, and plan multi-step tasks—capabilities that could transform both AI research and real-world applications.
Meta will partner with the startup, supporting some projects aligned with its commercial interests while allowing other work to remain independent.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth praised LeCun for his contributions. They highlighted his work on open-source projects, including the Llama models, which have become key tools in the global AI research community.
LeCun is widely recognized as one of the "godfathers" of deep learning, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, with the trio receiving the Turing Award in 2018 for their pioneering work.
LeCun has also been a professor at New York University since 2003 and collaborated with colleagues there in shaping his new AMI project.
His departure comes as Meta reshapes its AI strategy, following major investments in AI startups and a wave of AI-related job cuts.
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