French engineer Yann LeCun, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, has confirmed his departure from Meta after 12 years with the group. He plans to launch his own startup focused on AI models that understand the physical world. The move comes amid a strategic shift at Meta under CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Yann LeCun, a 65-year-old French computer engineer, was recruited by Facebook in 2013, before it became Meta. Recognized as one of AI's pioneers for his work on neural networks, he led the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab for 12 years. In 2018, he received the Turing Award, often called the Nobel of computing, shared with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.
On November 19, 2025, LeCun confirmed on Facebook his departure from Meta, where he oversaw AI research. The exit ties to the company's strategic shifts. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently restructured AI efforts, hiring Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, to lead Superintelligence Labs, a new unit consolidating AI resources. LeCun was placed within this team under Wang's oversight.
Meta is now focusing on large language models (LLMs), like those powering ChatGPT or Gemini. Yet LeCun has criticized these models as limited. He favors approaches using images and videos to grasp the real world, paving the way for robotics advances.
Concurrently, LeCun will start a venture aimed at «leading to the next great AI revolution: systems capable of understanding the physical world, with permanent memory, able to reason and plan complex actions», as he posted on Facebook. This initiative seeks to overcome current AI constraints for innovative applications.