Meta’s star AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave for own startup

Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported. The French-US scientist has reportedly told associates he will depart in the coming months and is already in early talks to raise funds for the new venture. The departure comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg radically overhauled Meta’s AI operations after deciding the company had fallen behind rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone. Unlike current large language models (such as the kind that power ChatGPT) that predict the next segment of data in a sequence, world models would ideally simulate cause-and-effect scenarios, understand physics, and enable machines to reason and plan more like animals do. LeCun has said this architecture could take a decade to fully develop.

While some AI experts believe that Transformer-based AI models—such as large language models, video synthesis models, and interactive world synthesis models—have emergently modeled physics or absorbed the structural rules of the physical world from training data examples, the evidence so far generally points to sophisticated pattern-matching rather than a base understanding of how the physical world actually works.

LeCun’s planned exit is the latest in a string of leadership reshuffles at Meta during what has been a tumultuous year for the company. A key turning point was the disappointing launch and benchmark-gaming controversy of the AI language model Llama 4 in April, which many in the industry saw as a flop when it performed worse than the most advanced offerings from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Meanwhile, the Meta AI chatbot has failed to gain traction with consumers and suffered controversies and setbacks over its interactions with children.