By bizn_fun 
Prof LeCun announced his planned departure from Meta on Wednesday after more than a week of rumours and reports of his exit.
In a series of posts on Threads, he thanked the company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and highlighted its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab as his “proudest non-technical accomplishment”.
“As many of you have heard through rumours or recent media articles, I am planning to leave Meta after 12 years: 5 years as founding director of FAIR and 7 years as Chief AI Scientist,” he wrote, external.
“The impact of FAIR on the company, on the field of AI, on the tech community, and on the wider world has been spectacular.”
The lab has over the years focused on developing systems and techniques to advance machine learning and translation.
But, like large parts of the sector, Meta has looked to concentrate much of the company’s research and spending on large language models (LLMs) – the systems at the heart of generative AI tools such as chatbots and image generators.
Prof LeCun has suggested LLMs will be less useful in attempting to create AI systems that can match human intelligence.
Instead, he wants to pursue what he called “advanced machine intelligence”.
It trains AI models primarily by using visual learning – trying to replicate how a child or a baby animal learns.
That differs to LLMs, which are fed vast amounts of existing data, and then asked to generate a result based on the data and a prompt.