Mark Zuckerberg is picking groupthink over an AI Godfather

BLOOMBERG

LeCun had become an AI legend for inventing convolutional neural networks while working at AT&T Bell Laboratories. The breakthrough technology taught computers to recognize images, powering everything from facial recognition to self-driving cars. Zuckerberg showed up in person at a conference to recruit him.

Twelve years later and LeCun has been sidelined by Zuckerberg’s new obsession with LLMs, which should come as no surprise given the Meta boss’ years-long strategy of copying other platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok to stay relevant.

Wang now oversees development of Meta’s language models, and the company’s October layoffs hit FAIR while sparing Wang’s team. That underscores Zuckerberg’s bet on his expensive new hires over the legacy staff working under LeCun and pushing forward his research on world models.

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