Yann LeCun, the renowned AI pioneer and former chief AI scientist at Meta, has candidly shared how he strongly disliked his managerial responsibilities during his 12-year tenure at the Mark Zuckerberg-led firm, and how it led him to focus on scientific vision and innovation.
LeCun, who founded and led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, described his time as a director as deeply unfulfilling. “I can do management, but I don’t like doing it,” he said in an interview with MIT Technology Review. “I kind of hated being a director. I am not good at this career management thing. I’m much more visionary and a scientist.”
LeCun explained that his core mission is “not leadership, but to accelerate technological progress and inspire others to work on what interests them.” He highlighted a fundamental mismatch between traditional management and the nature of research, stating, “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
He also critiqued the lack of research experience among some managers, noting, “There’s no experience with research or how you practice research… Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”
Disagreements and departure from Meta
LeCun’s comments come months after he left Meta in November 2025 to launch AMI Labs, a Paris-based startup focused on open-source “world model” AI systems that aim to better understand and reflect the physical world. He now serves as executive chairman of AMI Labs, with former Meta colleague Alex LeBrun as CEO, while continuing to teach at New York University.
During his time at Meta, LeCun expressed disagreement with some decisions by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, including the disbanding of FAIR’s robotics team. He also highlighted tensions following Zuckerberg’s AI reorganisation, which briefly placed Scale AI cofounder Alexandr Wang in a supervisory role over him. LeCun maintained that Wang’s lack of a deep research background made oversight ineffective in his view.
Despite these challenges, LeCun described himself as unsuited for executive roles like CEO, “I’m pretty good at guessing what type of technology will work or not. But I can’t be a CEO. I’m both too disorganised for this, and also too old.”
A shift to independent innovation
LeCun’s departure follows his long-standing advocacy for alternative AI approaches beyond dominant large language models (LLMs), which he has called limited for achieving true superintelligence. AMI Labs positions itself as a non-American, non-Chinese frontier lab committed to open-source development, reflecting LeCun’s belief in collaborative progress over hierarchical management.
Following LeCun’s departure and Meta’s major AI leadership restructuring in 2025, Alexandr Wang now serves as the company’s Chief AI Officer. Wang, the former CEO and cofounder of Scale AI, joined Meta after the company acquired a significant stake in his firm and now leads Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the new frontier AI research unit focused on accelerating progress toward advanced AI models. Under Wang’s direction, the lab has already delivered its first high-profile internal AI models in early 2026, as confirmed by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. This hints at Meta’s aggressive push to compete in the race for superintelligence amid heavy investments and talent poaching.