AI pioneer Yann LeCun has expressed skepticism about Meta’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI and the appointment of its 28-year-old co-founder, Alexandr Wang, to lead the company’s new Super Intelligence Lab. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, LeCun, who previously served as Meta’s chief AI scientist before announcing his departure to launch his own venture, criticized Wang’s lack of experience in AI research. LeCun described Wang as “inexperienced” and said he didn’t fully grasp the nuances of how AI research is conducted. “He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know… but there’s no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher,” LeCun said. Wang’s hiring was a centerpiece of Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive push to strengthen Meta’s AI capabilities amid growing competition from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The deal included a massive $14 billion investment in Scale AI, which provides critical data labeling services for training large language models. LeCun revealed that Zuckerberg became increasingly frustrated with the progress of Meta’s Llama series, the company’s flagship open-source AI models. He claimed the team “fudged” some of the results for Llama 4, a move that drew public criticism and raised concerns about the integrity of Meta’s benchmarking. This, LeCun said, led Zuckerberg to lose confidence in the existing AI team. “Mark was really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved in this,” he said. “And so basically sidelined the entire GenAI organisation.” Despite briefly being under Wang’s management during the reorganization, LeCun emphasized that he was never actually directed by him. “You don't tell a researcher what to do,” he said. “You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do.” LeCun also criticized the direction of Meta’s new AI strategy, calling the team “completely LLM-pilled”—overly focused on large language models. He argued that LLMs are a dead end when it comes to achieving true superintelligence, a view he has long held. “I'm sure there's a lot of people at Meta, including perhaps Alex, who would like me to not tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence,” he said. “But I'm not gonna change my mind because some dude thinks I'm wrong. I'm not wrong. My integrity as a scientist cannot allow me to do this.” LeCun’s new startup, reportedly named Advanced Machine Intelligence, is focused on alternative AI approaches he believes are more promising than current LLMs. He will serve as executive chair, not CEO, citing his disorganization and age as reasons he’s not suited for day-to-day leadership. “I'm a scientist, a visionary. I can inspire people to work on interesting things. I'm pretty good at guessing what type of technology will work or not. But I can't be a CEO,” he said. “I'm both too disorganised for this, and also too old!”