Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit to launch startup, FT reports (www.reuters.com)

Financial Times reporting, confirmed by Reuters, says Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup and is in early fundraising talks. The move comes amid a major Meta AI reorganization under CEO Mark Zuckerberg that consolidated teams into “Superintelligence Labs” and brought in Alexandr Wang (ex-Scale AI) to lead the unit — a shift that reportedly moved LeCun from reporting to Meta’s product chief to reporting to Wang. LeCun is a foundational figure in deep learning (co-inventor of convolutional neural networks and 2018 Turing Award laureate), a NYU professor, and a noted skeptic of large language models as the sole route to superintelligence. His departure could signal both a leadership and research-direction shift: a new startup led by LeCun may pursue alternate architectures or foundational research emphases (representation learning, energy-efficient models, or novel inductive biases) rather than purely scaling LLMs. For the AI community, this raises the prospect of more diverse research agendas, potential talent and funding competition, and sharper strategic contrasts with Meta’s heavy infrastructure bets and $600 billion U.S. investment pledge.