AI researcher Yann LeCun says he is unconvinced by Meta’s multibillion-dollar push into artificial general intelligence under Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old Scale AI cofounder hired to lead the companys Superintelligence Labs.
Speaking to the Financial Times, LeCun, who served as Metas chief AI scientist before announcing in November that he would leave to start his own company, described Wang as “inexperienced” and not yet attuned to how AI researchers work.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know,” LeCun said. “There’s no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”
Wangs appointment followed Metas roughly $14 billion investment in Scale AI, a deal that also brought him over from the startup as a high-profile hire in the intensifying AI talent war.
LeCun said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg became frustrated with the companys progress on Llama, its open-source AI model family. He claimed that Metas AI team “fudged” some of the performance results for Llama 4, echoing earlier criticism that the company may have sought to game benchmark tests.
According to LeCun, the incident damaged Zuckerbergs trust in the existing AI group. “Mark was really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved in this,” he told the FT. “And so basically sidelined the entire GenAI organisation.”
LeCun said that although Wang was briefly his superior after a restructuring of Metas AI units, the reporting line did not change how he worked. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do,” he said. “You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
LeCun characterized Metas new AI leadership as heavily focused on large language models. He argued that many inside the company are fully committed to LLMs, even as he continues to publicly challenge their long-term potential.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence,” LeCun said. “But I’m not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. My integrity as a scientist cannot allow me to do this.”
LeCun has repeatedly said that LLMs are fundamentally limited and that a different technical approach is needed to reach more advanced forms of AI. His new company is reportedly called Advanced Machine Intelligence, reflecting the alternative path he advocates.
LeCun will serve as executive chair of the startup rather than CEO. “I’m a scientist, a visionary. I can inspire people to work on interesting things. I’m pretty good at guessing what type of technology will work or not. But I can’t be a CEO,” he said. “I’m both too disorganised for this, and also too old!”