AI luminary Yann LeCun is leaving Meta after a decade, citing fundamental disagreements with CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the company’s AI strategy. LeCun believes large language models are a ‘dead end’ for superintelligence, a view clashing with Meta’s massive investment.

AI pioneer and Meta’s most famous employee Yann LeCun has opened up about his departure from Meta after more than a decade, revealing that mounting pressure from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and fundamental disagreements over the company’s AI direction ultimately drove him to leave. In an interview with the Financial Times, the 65-year-old computer scientist—who won the prestigious Turing Award in 2018—didn’t mince words about Meta’s pivot toward large language models and the hiring of 28-year-old Alexandr Wang to lead the company’s superintelligence efforts.LeCun told FT that Zuckerberg “basically lost confidence” in Meta’s generative AI organization after the team “fudged” benchmark results for Llama 4, released in April 2025. “Mark was really upset and basically sidelined the entire GenAI organisation,” LeCun said, predicting that “a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave.”

Philosophical divide: Why LeCun calls LLMs a “dead end”

The departure marks a significant split between LeCun’s vision for AI and Meta’s current direction. Whereas Zuckerberg has spent billions developing large language models in the quest for “superintelligence,” LeCun has long maintained that LLMs are by nature limited. “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,” he told the publication.LeCun’s new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, will focus on “world models” that learn from videos and spatial data rather than just text—an approach he believes is necessary for AI to truly understand the physical world.

“Young and inexperienced”: LeCun’s assessment of his former boss

The French scientist didn’t hold back when discussing Wang, who Meta hired after investing $14.9 billion in his company Scale AI. “He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know… There’s no experience with research or how you practice research,” LeCun said, adding pointedly: “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”Despite the tensions, LeCun maintains he remains on good terms with Zuckerberg personally, and Meta will partner with his new venture.