Last week, news broke that Yann LeCun, Turin Award winner and one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, is leaving his role as Meta’s chief AI scientist by the end of the year. LeCun will be starting a new AI startup with details to come later.
There were already rumors of LeCun being sidelined after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembled his new Superintelligence Lab, headed by Alexandr Wang, co-founder and former CEO of Scale AI. However, LeCun had already made clear long before his departure that he was not satisfied with the direction that the AI community is headed.
While most efforts are going into large language models (LLMs), LeCun has been very vocal about their limitations, particularly in their ability to solve real-world problems.
“We are not going to get to human-level AI just by scaling LLMs,” LeCun told Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology podcast in May, calling LLMs systems with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, “not a system that can invent solutions to new problems.”
"We won't reach AGI with LLMs."Yann LeCun has been saying this for years. Now he's leaving Meta to prove it.LeCun invented convolutional neural networks—the tech behind every smartphone camera and self-driving car today. He won the Turing Award in 2018, AI's Nobel Prize.At… pic.twitter.com/4zWOxzRjae— Ask Perplexity (@AskPerplexity) November 18, 2025
