"Meta's Chief AI Scientist LeCun to Leave Company and Launch Startup"

Yan LeCun, Professor at New York University. New York University website

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Yan LeCun, Professor at New York University and the "Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist" who has led related research at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for the past 12 years, is reportedly considering establishing a startup.

The Financial Times (FT) in the UK reported on November 11 (local time) that Professor LeCun has recently informed acquaintances of his intention to resign and has begun negotiations to secure funding for the new company.

Since 2013, Professor LeCun has been a pivotal figure at Meta, serving as Chief AI Scientist and Vice President, leading the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab. Meta recruited Professor LeCun when it established FAIR and began investing in AI in earnest.

This news comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg is shifting Meta's AI research focus toward the development of "superintelligence." Zuckerberg believes that the company's artificial general intelligence (AGI) lags behind OpenAI and Google, and is now concentrating on developing superintelligence that surpasses them.

Accordingly, Meta has implemented large-scale organizational restructuring and workforce reductions, and has brought in ScaleAI founder Alexander Wang as Chief AI Officer (CAIO). It is also reported that Professor LeCun now reports directly to CAIO Wang, rather than to the previous Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

In contrast, Professor LeCun is skeptical of the superintelligence strategy that relies on large language models (LLMs). He has argued that, while LLMs are useful, they lack the ability to reason and plan like humans.

Instead, he has proposed the "world model" approach, in which AI learns by directly observing the world, as an alternative. He is expected to continue related research even after founding his startup.

Professor LeCun currently holds the title of Silver Professor at New York University, working in the fields of data science, computer science, neuroscience, electrical, and computer engineering. He is renowned as the creator of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are widely used in image, video, and speech recognition. Convolutional neural networks are a type of deep learning neural network designed to efficiently process image or video data.

He is also referred to as one of the "three giants of AI," along with Geoffrey Hinton, Professor at the University of Toronto, and Yoshua Bengio, Professor at the University of Montreal. The three jointly received the Turing Award, known as the "Nobel Prize of science," in 2018.

Meanwhile, despite concerns about an AI bubble, Meta plans to invest $600 billion (approximately 877 trillion won) in U.S. AI infrastructure over the next three years. This is the amount that CEO Zuckerberg pledged to President Donald Trump at the White House in September, and is expected to be used for the development of AI data center-related power, energy, and community infrastructure.

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