LeCun has previously said he does not agree that LLMs, which Meta is investing billions into, are the future of intelligence.
The French ‘godfather of AI’, Yann LeCun, announced he is leaving Meta to start his own machine learning company to “bring the next revolution of AI”.
LeCun said he will leave his post as Meta's chief artificial intelligence researcher at the end of the year.
“As many of you have heard through rumours or recent media articles, I am planning to leave Meta after 12 years: 5 years as founding director of FAIR and 7 years as Chief AI Scientist,” he wrote on LinkedIn on Wednesday.
LeCun has been vocal that large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI, such as ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama, are limited and will not lead to real computer intelligence, despite Meta pouring millions of dollars into it.
"LLMs are great, they're useful, we should invest in them — a lot of people are going to use them," said LeCun at an event on Sunday.
"They are not a path to human-level intelligence. They're just not. Right now, they are sucking the air out of the room anywhere they go — and so there's basically no resources [left] for anything else. And so for the next revolution, we need to take a step back and figure out what's missing from the current approaches,” he added.
LeCun has said he believes real computer intelligence will come from so-called world models, which learn with visual data, such as watching videos, instead.
Rather than predicting the next word, as LLMs do, they predict what happens in the next world and how things evolve over time with the goal of learning cause-and-effect.
LeCun said the aim of his new start-up was to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program he had been pursuing at FAIR and NYU.
“The goal of the start-up is to bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences,” he said.
AMI, which is the French word for friend, will have “far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not,” he added.
LeCun said that developing AMI as “an independent entity is a way to maximise its broad impact”.
He thanked Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and said that because of his and other Meta executives' previous interest in AMI, Meta will be a “partner in the new company”. However, LeCun did not specify the nature of the partnership.
