AI Godfather Slams Meta’s $300M Bet on 29-Year-Old Boss

There’s a rage about age in Silicon Valley.

AI legend Yann LeCun has words on Meta’s controversial leadership choice. The 65-year-old “godfather of AI” delivered a scathing public assessment of Meta’s newest AI chief Alexandr Wang.

LeCun didn’t mince words when discussing the 29-year-old billionaire who joined Meta as chief AI officer in 2025. Despite Wang’s Scale AI billions and Zuckerberg’s massive bet on his leadership, LeCun told the Financial Times that the young executive has “no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it.”

The timing makes this criticism even more interesting — it comes as Meta reportedly threw $100 million signing bonuses at top talent from OpenAI in a desperate bid to rebuild its AI credibility.

Talent war

Meta’s aggressive hiring spree appears to be crumbling before their eyes. The company’s Superintelligence Labs hemorrhaged at least eight key employees within just two months of its launch four months ago, creating a talent exodus that continues today.

The departures tell a brutal story of buyer’s remorse. Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, both previously at OpenAI, resigned from Meta’s Superintelligence Labs four months ago and headed straight back to their former employer.

Even more damaging, Rishabh Agarwal, an Indian researcher poached from Google DeepMind with a reported $1 million salary, announced his departure after just five months. His farewell post twisted the knife deeper, quoting Zuckerberg’s own words against the company: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”

Llama 4 scandal

LeCun dropped a revelation about what triggered Meta’s leadership chaos: the Llama 4 benchmarking controversy that destroyed Zuckerberg’s faith in his AI team. The AI pioneer disclosed that Meta was accused of gaming benchmarks to make its Llama 4 model appear more impressive, leading Zuckerberg to lose confidence in everyone involved.

“Mark basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved,” LeCun explained this week, describing how this scandal triggered the massive reorganization and talent purge. The aftermath has been catastrophic for morale: “A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave,” LeCun predicted ominously.

This internal meltdown explains why Meta has been desperately throwing hundreds of millions at external talent — they’re attempting to rebuild from scratch after their credibility imploded.

Next chapter

LeCun’s departure to start his own company called Advanced Machine Intelligence signals a fundamental philosophical break with Meta’s direction. His stark warning that “LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence” directly contradicts Meta’s massive investment in large language models under Wang’s leadership.

The talent bleeding reveals a deeper issue about Silicon Valley’s AI race: astronomical compensation can’t buy mission alignment. As Anthropic’s Benjamin Mann noted four months ago, “My best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity. My best case at Meta is we make money.”

The numbers back this up — Meta’s retention rate for AI employees stands at just 64%, significantly lower than competitors like Google DeepMind at 78%.

The implications are intriguing: Meta’s $14 billion bet on Wang and its superintelligence strategy may become the most expensive hiring mistake in tech history.

With the AI godfather himself calling out the inexperience at the top and predicting further departures, the company’s path to AI dominance looks increasingly uncertain.

Whether this colossal gamble pays off remains to be seen, but early warning signs suggest Meta’s talent war strategy is becoming its biggest liability in the race for artificial superintelligence.

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