Meta AI chief Yann LeCun reportedly leaving company

It seems like there's always a shakeup going down in AI, with Meta seeing more shakeups than most. The company recently laid off 600 people within its AI unit.

Now, Yann LeCun, a chief AI scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, is planning to leave the company and build his own startup, anonymous sources told the Financial Times. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.

The report says that LeCun, who won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for breakthroughs in AI, will be leaving in the coming months to pursue work on a startup that focuses on his own world models. He is already working on raising capital for the startup, according to the Financial Times.

LeCun wouldn't be the first to focus on world models, which, according to TechCrunch, are AI systems that develop "an internal understanding of its environment so it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios to predict outcomes." World Lab, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia are all also developing world models.

This comes at a time when Meta is heavily inserting AI into users' feeds and is working frantically to keep up with AI rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.