How Meta’s highest-paid employee made its chief scientist do what he told Elon Musk he will 'never'
Yann LeCun, Meta's Chief AI Scientist, is departing after 12 years to launch a startup focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence. This move follows a reported shift in Meta's AI priorities, with the company acquiring ScaleAI and appointing Alexandr Wang. LeCun's new venture aims to develop AI systems with a deeper understanding of the physical world, memory, reasoning, and planning capabilities.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI scientist is leaving the company after 12 years. Sharing a post on professional networking platform LinkedIn in November, LeCun said that he is building a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) that he has been pursuing over the last several years with “colleagues at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), New York University (NYU) and beyond.
” Interestingly, his move marks a shift from his previous stance on entrepreneurship. The AI researcher once said that he has no interest in running companies or chasing deals. In a public conversation with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in May last year, LeCun famously said “I'm a scientist, not a business or product person.”
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Yann LeCun’s exit from the company became ‘inevitable’ after Meta’s $15 billion acquisition of ScaleAI and the appointment of Alexandr Wang – making him Meta’s highest paid employee ever. In November 2025, Hyperbolic CEO and CTO Yuchen Jin shared a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), alleging Mark Zuckerberg appointed Wang to lead Meta’s new “superintelligence” division.
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As per the post, the decision of Zuckerberg to have LeCun report to Wang signaled a shift in priorities — away from foundational AI research and toward rapid, product-driven development. “Yann never believed in LLM-to-AGI. Zuck’s patience ran out,” Jin wrote, referencing LeCun’s well-known skepticism of large language models as a path to artificial general intelligence.
What Yann LeCun said on leaving Meta
In a LinkedIn post, LeCun wrote:“As many of you have heard through rumors or recent media articles, I am planning to leave Meta after 12 years: 5 years as founding director of FAIR and 7 years as Chief AI Scientist.
The impact of FAIR on the company, on the field of AI, on the tech community, and on the wider world has been spectacular. The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment.I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond. The goal of the startup is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.I am extremely grateful to Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, Chris Cox, and Mike Schroepfer for their support of FAIR, and for their support of the AMI program over the last few years. Because of their continued interest and support, Meta will be a partner of the new company.As I envision it, AMI will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not. Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact. I will give some more details about the new company when the time comes. In the meantime, I’m sticking around Meta until the end of the year.”