Meta AI chief Yann LeCun reportedly leaving company
November 12, 2025
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Credit: Photo by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images
It seems like there’s always a shakeup going down in AI, with Meta seeing more shakeups than most. The company recently laid off 600 people within its AI unit.
Now, Yann LeCun, a chief AI scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, is planning to leave the company and build his own startup, anonymous sources told the Financial Times. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.
The report says that LeCun, who won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for breakthroughs in AI, will be leaving in the coming months to pursue work on a startup that focuses on his own world models. He is already working on raising capital for the startup, according to the Financial Times.
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LeCun wouldn’t be the first to focus on world models, which, according to TechCrunch, are AI systems that develop “an internal understanding of its environment so it can simulate cause-and-effect scenarios to predict outcomes.” World Lab, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia are all also developing world models.
This comes at a time when Meta is heavily inserting AI into users’ feeds and is working frantically to keep up with AI rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
Meta
Christianna Silva is a senior culture reporter covering social platforms and the creator economy, with a focus on the intersection of social media, politics, and the economic systems that govern us. Since joining Mashable in 2021, they have reported extensively on meme creators, content moderation, and the nature of online creation under capitalism.
Before joining Mashable, they worked as an editor at NPR and MTV News, a reporter at Teen Vogue and VICE News, and as a stablehand at a mini-horse farm. You can follow her on Bluesky @christiannaj.bsky.social and Instagram @christianna_j.

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