Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and a prominent figure in the AI community, plans to leave the company to start his own venture, according to a report from the Financial Times. LeCun, who is also a professor at NYU and a Turing Award winner, aims to focus on developing world models, which are AI systems that create internal representations of environments to predict outcomes. His departure comes at a critical juncture for Meta, which is trying to catch up with competitors like OpenAI and Google by restructuring its AI efforts. Meta has recently hired over 50 engineers and researchers from rival firms to form a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The company also invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and appointed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead this division. Despite these efforts, reports indicate growing frustration among new hires due to the bureaucratic challenges within Meta. LeCun’s research at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division has been overshadowed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push for more immediate results, particularly after the previous Llama 4 AI models fell behind competitors. LeCun has voiced concerns about the current hype around AI, especially large language models (LLMs). He believes that before we can effectively control advanced AI systems, we need to develop smarter systems with more basic capabilities. His skepticism reflects a broader debate within the AI community about the pace of development and the expectations surrounding AI technologies. Meta did not provide a comment on LeCun’s potential departure.