Hyperbolic co-founder and CTO Yuchen Jin stated on Tuesday that Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun’s departure was inevitable, signaling that CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on Alexander Wang and the AI leadership shift left little room for the long-time chief scientist.

In a post on social platform X, Jin wrote that LeCun’s exit was an unavoidable outcome after Zuckerberg spent $15 billion to acquire Wang’s company and placed "LeCun under his reporting line."

He added that Zuckerberg grew panicked following OpenAI’s ChatGPT success, as Meta’s own large language model, Llama 4, failed to achieve similar traction.

According to Jin, Zuckerberg’s growing impatience with LeCun’s long-term approach to AI research ultimately led to his departure.

"LeCun never believed LLMs lead to AGI. Zuckerberg’s patience ran out," Jin said, referencing LeCun’s skepticism about large language models as the foundation for artificial general intelligence.

Jin speculated that Zuckerberg might later "buy LeCun back at a crazy price," drawing parallels to Google’s rehiring of prominent AI pioneer Noam Shazeer.

Shazeer, creator of Google’s LaMDA, left in October 2021 to co-found chatbot startup Character.AI. Reports indicate Google spent $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.AI’s tech and brought Shazeer back to lead its AI initiatives.

Previously reporting to Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, LeCun now answers to Alexander Wang, founder of Scale AI, who was hired to lead Meta’s new "superintelligence" division.

This restructuring reflects Zuckerberg’s pivot from fundamental AI research toward rapid, product-centric innovation to catch up with OpenAI and Google.

LeCun has long argued that while LLMs are "useful," they cannot reason or plan like humans—a stance reportedly at odds with Meta’s new AI direction.