Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms, at the VivaTech conference in Paris, May 22, 2024.
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meta Former chief AI scientist Yan Lekun called the 29-year-old AI chief “inexperienced” and warned of an exodus of employees from the company.
Scale AI co-founder and billionaire Alexander Wang joined Meta as chief AI officer in 2025 after the tech giant bought a 49% stake in his startup.
His hiring comes as the competition for AI talent intensifies. Meta reportedly offered a $100 million signing bonus to poach top talent from ChatGPT maker OpenAI as it competes with other hyperscalers to dominate the multibillion-dollar AI market with cutting-edge models.
Lekun, known as one of the “godfathers of AI” and who left Meta in November, described Wang as “young” and “inexperienced” in an interview with the Financial Times.
“He’s a quick learner and knows what he doesn’t know,” Lekun said of Wang, who heads Meta’s new AI research division, TBD Lab, and is tasked with building new AI models. However, Lekun added, “I have no experience with research, nor do I know how research is practiced or done. I don’t know what is attractive to researchers and what is repulsive.”
Lekun, 65, added that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had “fundamentally lost trust in everyone involved” after the company was accused of running gaming benchmarks to make the Rama 4 model look more impressive. Zuckerberg “basically sidelined the entire AI Generation organization,” Reckun said.
“A lot of people have left, but a lot of people who haven’t left yet will leave,” Lekun added.
“We had a lot of new ideas and really cool things for them to implement. But they just wanted something inherently safe and proven,” he said. “If you do this, you’ll be late.”
CNBC reached out to Mehta for a response, but had not received a response as of this article’s publication.
AI superintelligence is a “dead end” for LLMs
When asked about Meta’s AI hiring push, Lekun said, “We’ll see if it was a good idea in the future.”
But, he added, “LLMs are basically a dead end when it comes to superintelligence.”
“I think there are a lot of people at Meta, probably including Alex, who would prefer that I not tell the world about it,” Reckun said.
Lecun’s new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, focuses on “world models,” AI systems that learn not only from language but also from video and physical data.
Nabla, a health tech AI startup that partnered with Lekun’s company in December, said in a press release that unlike models around the world, LLM “still faces several structural constraints, including hallucinations, non-deterministic reasoning, and limited handling of continuous multimodal data, making autonomous decision-making difficult.”
