Mark Zuckerberg Is Picking Groupthink Over an AI Godfather

When you're a leading scientist who thinks Big Tech is chasing the wrong AI breakthrough, you probably won’t last long at a company desperate to catch up with the herd. Yann LeCun, a French-US scientist known as one of the Godfathers of AI thanks to his foundational research on deep learning, is leaving Meta after 12 years to start his own company, according to the Financial Times. His departure underscores just how much Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted away from seeking the next innovative shift in AI to chasing its latest trend: scrambling to match OpenAI by cloning ChatGPT.

LeCun has long been an outspoken, contrarian thinker on AI, arguing that OpenAI’s sparking of the generative AI boom also created an unhealthy obsession with large language models (LLMs). LeCun’s view is that chatbots might be alluring and useful, but they aren’t the path to software that’s smarter than humans. For that you need “world models,” which are trained on videos and other spatial data from the physical world, picked up with sensors and cameras, not just content scraped from the internet.