Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year.
LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can “understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.”
His announcement, after more than a week of rumors, comes after Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 600 AI jobs this fall.
LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlap with Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not.
Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta’s AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research, which has often worked to advance computer science research that's not directly tied to immediate commercial products. LeCun stepped down as the group’s director in 2018 but has remained Meta’s chief AI scientist.
His departure reflects a shift since Meta in June made a $14.3 billion investment in AI data company Scale and recruited its CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead a team developing “superintelligence” at the tech giant.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing to revive commercial AI efforts as the company faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.
LeCun has long expressed public skepticism about the sophistication of large language models behind chatbots like ChatGPT, saying that they are useful but doubting that they will be a path to the better-than-human AI that other tech leaders have promised. He has also been a strong advocate for open-source AI systems that, like Meta's own large language model, Llama, make their key components publicly accessible in a way that some AI safety advocates deem too risky.
LeCun is also a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003.
LeCun studied in his native France and later Canada before spending his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could “read” text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, speaks at the Vivatech show in Paris, France, Wednesday, June 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
DENPASAR, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia delayed on Wednesday the deportation of a Scottish crime boss arrested on the resort island of Bali in connection with large-scale drug trafficking and money laundering.
Steven Lyons, a senior figure in an international crime syndicate who had spent months on the run, would now be deported on Thursday, according to Husnan Handano, a spokesperson for Bali’s immigration office, without giving a reason for the delay.
Lyons, 45, was originally to be sent to Spain via Doha by Qatar Airways on Wednesday evening.
Lyons was detained on Saturday on arrival at Bali’s Ngurah Rai international airport from Singapore, after the immigration system flagged him based on an Interpol Red Notice issued at Spain’s request. A Red Notice is an alert issued by Interpol at the request of a member country for police worldwide to arrest a suspect for extradition.
The alleged leader of the Lyons crime family, he was based in Scotland and was wanted in Spain and Britain. He has been on Spain’s wanted list for about two years, following a murder there in 2024.
Bali Police Chief Daniel Adityajaya said his arrest was part of a joint investigation involving Spanish and Scottish police.
Lyons is alleged to have led a transnational criminal network operating out of Scotland that controlled narcotics trafficking routes from Spain to the United Kingdom. His organized crime ring is suspected of using shell companies for money laundering in Europe and the Middle East — including in Spain, Scotland, England, Dubai, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey.
Prior to his arrest in Bali, police in Scotland and Spain had carried out raids in connection with the case that led to several arrests. Suspects were also detained in Turkey, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates.
Scottish media have reported that Lyons survived a 2006 shooting in Glasgow that killed his cousin and later moved to Spain before settling in Dubai, in the UAE. Last May, his brother and an associate were shot and killed in a suspected gangland shooting at a beachfront bar in Fuengirola, southern Spain.
Karmini reported from Jakarta, Indonesia.
A Scottish man identified as Steven Lyons, who is described as a senior figure in an international crime syndicate, center, is escorted by police officers at the regional police headquarters in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (AP Photo)
A Scottish man identified as Steven Lyons, who is described as a senior figure in an international crime syndicate, center, is escorted by police officers at the regional police headquarters in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (AP Photo)
