Meta AI Chief Yann LeCun to Launch Startup

Yann LeCun, Meta Platforms Inc.'s chief artificial intelligence scientist and a Turing Award winner regarded as a pioneer in the field, plans to leave the company in the coming months to launch his own startup, according to people familiar with the matter. The departure, which LeCun has discussed with associates, comes amid a major overhaul of Meta's AI strategy under founder Mark Zuckerberg as the company races to catch up with competitors like OpenAI and Google.

LeCun, a French-American researcher who joined Meta in 2013, founded and led the company's Fundamental AI Research Lab, known as FAIR. There, he directed long-term projects aimed at developing advanced AI systems, including "world models" designed to enable machines to understand and interact with the physical world through video and spatial data, rather than relying solely on language-based large language models. He has argued that such models, while useful, fall short of achieving human-like reasoning and planning. LeCun's new venture will focus on advancing this work on world models, the people said, and he is in early discussions to raise funding for it.

The move highlights tensions within Meta's shifting AI...