Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, is reportedly planning to leave the social media giant to launch his own startup, according to a report by the Financial Times.
LeCun is one of the world’s most respected AI pioneers, is said to be in early talks to raise funds for his new venture. The news comes amid Meta doubling down on artificial intelligence, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg reorganising the company’s AI operations under a new division called Superintelligence Labs.
Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang has been hired to lead this initiative, and LeCun now reports to him instead of Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox.
Who is Yann LeCun?
LeCun is widely regarded as one of the “Godfathers of AI.” He helped develop the technology behind modern deep learning, the foundation of today’s artificial intelligence systems.
Born on July 8, 1960, in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France, LeCun studied engineering at ESIEE Paris and earned a PhD in Computer Science from Sorbonne University in 1987. His PhD work introduced an early version of the backpropagation algorithm, a key breakthrough for training neural networks.
After completing his doctorate, LeCun worked as a postdoctoral researcher under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.
He then joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1988, where he invented the convolutional neural network (CNN), the technology that enables computers to recognise images and handwriting. His LeNet model became the foundation for systems that read handwritten digits on bank cheques, used widely in the US in the 1990s.
As of 2025, Yann LeCun’s net worth is estimated at around $5 million. Most of his income comes from his work at Meta and his long academic and research career.
LeCun later joined New York University (NYU) in 2003 as a professor and became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science.
In 2013, he joined Facebook (now Meta) as the company’s first Director of AI Research, establishing the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab, which remains one of the leading centres for AI research in the world.
LeCun’s groundbreaking work has earned him some of the highest honours in computer science. He has won Turing Award in 2018, often called the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” shared with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for advances in deep learning.
LeCun was also honoured with IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award in 2014 and Princess of Asturias Award in 2022. Other honours include Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour, Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and French Académie des Sciences.
He has also received multiple honorary doctorates and remains an active researcher and public voice in the AI community.
While many in Silicon Valley focus on building ever-larger language models, LeCun has been critical of the idea that scaling up current models will lead to true intelligence.
He believes AI needs new architectures and training methods to achieve real understanding and reasoning, a view that has often put him at odds with mainstream AI approaches.
