Meta's departing chief AI scientist Yann LeCun isn't holding back. In a new interview, he talks about manipulated benchmarks, a furious Zuckerberg, and a wave of departures from the AI division.
Yann LeCun, one of the most influential figures in AI research, just unloaded on Meta in an interview with the Financial Times. The 65-year-old is leaving after more than a decade to launch his own AI startup, and he's painting a grim picture of the company's AI operation.
One issue is Llama 4, Meta's flagship language model that shipped in April 2025. LeCun admits the published benchmarks were misleading. "Results were fudged a little bit," he says. The team used different models for different benchmarks to game the numbers. This came out almost immediately after Llama 4's release.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't take it well: "Mark was really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved in this. And so basically sidelined the entire GenAI organization." LeCun adds, "A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven't yet left will leave."
LeCun recently said he's had almost nothing to do with the LLM project since the original Llama shipped. Meta is developing two new generative AI models codenamed "Mango" and "Avocado" with a planned release in the first half of 2026.
