Yann LeCun, the AI pioneer and former chief scientist at Meta, has expressed concerns about the company’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI and the appointment of its 28-year-old cofounder, Alexandr Wang, to lead Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. In an interview with the Financial Times, LeCun described Wang as “inexperienced” and said he did not fully understand how AI researchers work.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know… There is no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher,” LeCun said.
Meta’s AI reorganisation and Llama controversy
LeCun noted that CEO Mark Zuckerberg became frustrated after slow progress on Llama, Meta’s flagship open-source AI model. He added that some results of Llama 4 were “fudged” at the time, which contributed to Zuckerberg losing confidence in the existing AI team.
“Mark was really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved in this. And so basically sidelined the entire GenAI organisation,” LeCun said.
Even though Wang briefly became LeCun’s superior after the AI reorganisation, LeCun emphasized that he was not directly reporting to him. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do,” he said.
LeCun’s vision beyond LLMs
LeCun also criticised the overreliance on large language models for achieving superintelligence. “I’m sure there’s a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence. But I’m not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. My integrity as a scientist cannot allow me to do this,” he said.
He is now forming his own startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence, where he will serve as executive chair. “I’m a scientist, a visionary. I can inspire people to work on interesting things. 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,” LeCun added.
