(Reuters) -Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun is planning to leave the social media company to set up his own startup, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Deep-learning pioneer LeCun is also in early talks to raise funds for a new venture, according to the report.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram has significantly increased its investments in artificial intelligence, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg reorganizing the company’s AI initiatives under Superintelligence Labs.
Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI to lead the new AI effort. As a result, LeCun, who had reported to chief product officer Chris Cox, is now reporting to Wang, the report said.
LeCun and Meta did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
The company began investing in AI in 2013 by launching Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit and recruiting LeCun, who is a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence.
LeCun is also a Silver Professor of data science, computer science, neural science and electrical and computer engineering at New York University, according to his LinkedIn page.
He is known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional neural network, which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition.
LeCun, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their groundbreaking conceptual and engineering advancements in deep neural networks, which have become a cornerstone of modern computing and paved the way for the current AI boom.
Big Tech companies have been spending billions of dollars in building AI infrastructure for running machines that require massive computing power. Meta has pledged to invest $600 billion in the U.S. over the next three years.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
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