Resolution criteria

This market resolves YES if Yann LeCun officially leaves Meta in 2025. Resolution will be confirmed through official Meta announcements, LeCun's public statements, or credible reporting from major tech news outlets (TechCrunch, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters). The departure must be formally announced or confirmed by December 31, 2025. If LeCun remains at Meta through the end of 2025, the market resolves NO.

Background

Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, is planning to leave the company to build his own startup focused on world models. LeCun, a Turing Award winner, plans to leave in the coming months and is already in talks to raise capital for a startup. LeCun joined Facebook in December 2013 as the founding director of Fundamental AI Research (FAIR).

In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and brought on its 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs, shifting LeCun's reporting structure so he now reports to Wang. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted toward rapid deployment of large language models and AI products, particularly after Meta's Llama 4 model fell short of expectations.

Considerations

LeCun has publicly disagreed with Zuckerberg's heavy reliance on LLMs, calling them "useful but fundamentally limited" in their ability to reason and plan like humans. LeCun has said that world models, which aim to simulate cause-and-effect scenarios and predict outcomes, may take about a decade to mature. Multiple former employees told Fortune that FAIR has been "dying a slow death" as the company prioritized commercially focused AI teams over long-term research.