On Tuesday, Hyperbolic co-founder and CTO Yuchen Jin alleged that Yann LeCun's reported decision to leave Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) was inevitable, suggesting that CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bet on Alexandr Wang and a shift in AI leadership left little room for the company's longtime chief scientist.
Hyperbolic CTO Says Zuckerberg Panicked After ChatGPT Success
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Jin wrote that LeCun's exit was "an outcome" that was inevitable after Zuckerberg spent $15 billion to acquire Wang and made "Yann report to him."
He added that Zuckerberg panicked following the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, noting that Meta's own large language model, Llama 4, had failed to deliver comparable results.
According to Jin, Zuckerberg's growing impatience with LeCun's long-term approach to AI research ultimately led to the reported fallout.
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Hyperbolic CTO Cites Google's Noam Shazeer Parallel
"Yann never believed in LLM-to-AGI. Zuck's patience ran out," Jin said, referencing LeCun's skepticism toward large language models as the foundation for achieving artificial general intelligence.
Jin suggested that “Zuck might buy Yann back at a crazy price” drawing a comparison to Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary Google's decision to rehire renowned AI pioneer Noam Shazeer.
Shazeer, the creator behind Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), departed the company in October 2021 to found the chatbot startup Character.AI.
Google reportedly spent about $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.AI's technology and bring Shazeer back to spearhead its AI initiatives.
Meta's AI Power Shift Under Alexandr Wang
LeCun, who previously reported to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, now report to Wang, the 27-year-old Scale AI founder brought in to lead Meta's new "superintelligence" division.
The structural shake-up reflects Zuckerberg's pivot from fundamental AI research toward rapid, product-focused innovation aimed at catching up with OpenAI and Google.
LeCun has long maintained that while LLMs are "useful," they cannot reason or plan like humans — a stance that reportedly put him at odds with Meta's new AI direction.
Meta's AI Race Intensifies Amid Investor Concerns
Wang, defending Meta's progress, highlighted on X that Meta AI's visits surged 105% month-over-month in October 2025, outperforming rivals like Perplexity and Claude, citing Similarweb data.
Meanwhile, investor Steve Eisman has warned that Meta risks losing the AI spending war to Google and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), as Zuckerberg plans to invest over $600 billion in U.S.-based AI infrastructure by 2028.
Meta closed at $627.08 on Tuesday, down 0.74%, with after-hours trading showing a slight decline of 0.01% to $627. Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings show that META has continued to trend downward over short, medium and long-term periods. More detailed performance data can be found here.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
