As a graduate student in the 1980s, Yann LeCun had trouble finding an adviser for his Ph.D. thesis on machine learning—because no one else was studying the topic, he recalled later.
More recently, he’s become the odd man out at Meta META -0.07%decrease; red down pointing triangle. Despite worldwide renown as one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, he has been increasingly sidelined as the company’s approach diverged from his views on the technology’s future. On Tuesday, news broke that he may soon be leaving Meta to pursue a startup focused on so-called world models, technology that LeCun thinks is more likely to advance the state of AI than Meta’s current language models.
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