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Meta’s AI research lab is ‘dying a slow death,’ some insiders say—but Yann LeCun pushes back: ‘It’s a new beginning’ | Fortune Home 
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 Tech Meta Meta’s AI research lab is ‘dying a slow death,’ some insiders say. Meta prefers to call it ‘a new beginning’

 By Sharon Goldman Sharon Goldman AI Reporter Down Arrow Button Icon By Sharon Goldman Sharon Goldman AI Reporter Down Arrow Button Icon April 10, 2025, 4:21 PM ET Add us on Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta. Nathan Laine—Bloomberg/Getty Images When Meta’s head of AI research, Joelle Pineau, announced her departure last week, many wondered what was going on with FAIR, the famed Meta AI lab Pineau had led for the past two years and joined in 2017. 

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 The timing of Pineau’s resignation raised eyebrows. It came just days before an unusual weekend rollout of Meta’s Llama 4 models that wound up being surrounded by controversy. The new models drew criticism from the research community over a perceived rushed release, lack of transparency, possibly inflated performance metrics, and indications that Meta was failing to keep pace with open-source AI rivals like China’s DeepSeek . It all comes at a time of intense competition in the AI model market, with Meta planning to spend up to $65 billion this year on AI infrastructure. 

FAIR—an acronym for Fundamental AI Research—was once the crown jewel of AI development at Meta. But as Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted the company toward generative AI products over the past two years, the vaunted lab has become something of an orphan inside the organization, increasingly shoved out of the limelight by more commercially focused AI groups within the company. The newest Llama model, for instance, was the product of Meta’s separate GenAI team, not FAIR. Meanwhile, FAIR has languished, with talented researchers departing for rival companies and startups: More than half of the 14 authors of the original Llama research paper published in February 2023 had left the company six months later, while at least eight top researchers have left over the past year. 

 The lab has been “dying a slow death,” according to one former Meta employee who spoke to Fortune over the past week, echoing a sentiment from other ex–FAIR team members. Pineau’s departure, in this view, can be interpreted as the lab’s death rattle.

 Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist , who is considered one of the “godfathers” of deep learning and who founded FAIR, is now leading the team temporarily as Meta does an external search to replace Pineau (who is staying on until May). He denies FAIR is fading into oblivion, telling Fortune by email that “this is most definitely not the death of FAIR.” To the contrary, he insists the lab is about to experience a new dawn, and the existence of the GenAI product group actually enables FAIR to refocus on longer-term AI research. 

 

 “It’s more like a new beginn

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