AI godfather says Meta’s new 29-year-old AI boss is ‘inexperienced’ and warns of staff exodus

Meta's erstwhile main AI scientist, Yann Lecun, has called its 29-year-old AI brag "inexperienced," and warned of a unit exodus from the company.

Alexander Wang, the billionaire co-founder of Scale AI, joined Meta arsenic its main AI serviceman successful 2025 aft the tech elephantine bought a 49% involvement successful his startup.

His hiring came amid an intensifying AI endowment war, successful which Meta reportedly offered $100 cardinal signing bonuses to poach apical endowment from ChatGPT shaper OpenAI, arsenic it raced different hyperscalers to predominate the multibillion-dollar AI marketplace with the astir precocious models.

Lecun, who's known arsenic 1 of the "godfathers of AI" and discontinue Meta successful November, called Wang "young" and "inexperienced" successful an interrogation with the Financial Times.

"He learns fast, helium knows what helium doesn't know," Lecun said of Wang, who heads up Meta's caller AI probe portion TBD Labs and is tasked with gathering caller AI models. But Lecun added: "There's nary acquisition with probe oregon however you practise research, however you bash it. Or what would beryllium charismatic oregon repulsive to a researcher."

Lecun, 65, added that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "basically mislaid assurance successful everyone who was involved" aft the institution was accused of gaming benchmarks to marque its Llama 4 exemplary look much impressive. Zuckerberg "basically sidelined the full Gen AI organization," Lecun said.

"A batch of radical person left, a batch of radical who haven't yet near volition leave," Lecun added.

"We had a batch of caller ideas and truly chill worldly that they should implement. But they were conscionable going for things that were fundamentally harmless and proved," helium added. "When you bash this, you autumn behind."

CNBC contacted Meta for a response, but had not received a effect arsenic this communicative went live.

When asked astir Meta's AI hiring drive, Lecun said: "The aboriginal volition accidental whether that was a bully thought oregon not."

But helium added that "LLMs fundamentally are a dormant extremity erstwhile it comes to superintelligence." "I'm definite there's a batch of radical astatine Meta, including possibly Alex, who would similar maine to not archer the satellite that," Lecun said.

Lecun's caller startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, is focusing connected "world models:" AI systems that larn from videos and al information arsenic good arsenic language.

Nabla, a wellness tech AI startup that partnered with Lecun's institution successful December, said successful a press release that, dissimilar satellite models, LLMs "still look immoderate structural constraints, including hallucinations, non-deterministic reasoning, and constricted handling of continuous multimodal data, which marque autonomous decision-making challenging."