Meta Taps New Head of AI Lab After Staffer’s Return From Google

Meta Platforms Inc. told staff that it’s chosen Robert Fergus to helm its artificial intelligence research lab, elevating an employee who helped start the lab before a stint at competitor Alphabet Inc.

Fergus co-founded the Facebook AI Research lab, known as FAIR, in 2014 with Yann LeCun, who currently serves as the chief AI scientist at Meta. The unit is tasked with Meta’s longer-term AI research, including helping create models that help advance robotics, generate audio, understand images and push the boundaries of AI capabilities.