Meta loses its AI research head, as billions in investments hang in the balance
Meta
- Meta's AI research head, Joelle Pineau, is departing as the company makes major AI investments.
- Pineau's exit may complicate Meta's ability to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.
- Meta aims to make Llama the industry standard and reach a billion chatbot users.
Meta's head of artificial intelligence research, Joelle Pineau, is leaving the company at a time when the tech giant is pouring billions into AI development to keep pace with industry rivals.
Pineau, who joined Facebook in 2017 and served as the vice president of AI research and the leader of Meta's Fundamental AI Research group, announced her departure on LinkedIn on Tuesday.
"Today, as the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work," she wrote. "I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world." Her last day will be May 30.
"We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. "She's been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them." They did not answer a question about whether Meta had already started looking for a successor.
Pineau led a team of about 1,000 people across 10 locations at Meta. She wrote on LinkedIn that she would take time "to observe and reflect." She will continue to teach computer science at McGill University in Montreal.
Pineau's departure could complicate Meta's efforts to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's xAI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has prioritized AI at Meta, committing as much as $65 billion to AI-related projects this year.
Llama, Meta's open-source large language model that competes with proprietary models from other companies, has been a key initiative for the company. Zuckerberg aims to make Llama the industry standard worldwide and believes Meta's AI chatbot, available across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, could reach a billion users this year. As of December, 600 million users accessed Meta AI each month.
Last year, the company reorganized its AI teams to place Pineau and FAIR closer to the product division to accelerate the implementation of research into Meta's various products.
Pineau's work in AI dates back more than two decades. As a student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, she worked on a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots, she told the Financial Times in an interview. She said she joined Meta because "it was pretty obvious that a lot of the biggest innovation in AI was going to happen in industry" and added that she didn't interview anywhere else because "Meta was the only [company] that had a commitment to open science and open research."
Pineau's departure comes amid other leadership changes at Meta. The company recently lost two other senior executives: Dan Neary, the vice president for the Asia-Pacific region, Meta's largest market; and Kate Hamill, the managing director for retail and e-commerce in North America, who'd worked at the company for more than a decade.
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