FT: Meta's chief AI scientist decides to leave the company to start a startup

Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist Yang LeKun plans to leave the company. He is already in preliminary talks with investors to launch his own startup. This was reported by , Financial Times.

The new project will focus on the development of so-called "world models" – AI systems that can understand space and cause-and-effect relationships by learning not only from texts but also from video and physical data.

In 2025, Meta scaled back research at the FAIR lab, which LeCun had led since 2013, and focused on rapid product launches. After the failure of the Llama 4 model, Mark Zuckerberg created the TBD Lab team and attracted dozens of specialists from OpenAI and Google with compensation of up to $100 million.

LeCun, who now reports to the new head of the "superintelligence" team, Alexander Wang, does not share Zuckerberg's vision for the future of the LLM. He has repeatedly stated that large language models are only "useful tools" but are not capable of true human intelligence.

As a reminder, Meta has lured another top AI executive from Apple . Meta may pay up to $300 million for four years of work. And two researchers returned to OpenAI after working at Meta.