Meta’s A.I. Research Head Joelle Pineau Steps Down
As Meta prepares to invest tens of billions of dollars in the race to develop artificial intelligence, the company is losing one of its most influential researchers. Joelle Pineau, head of A.I. research at Meta, announced yesterday (April 1) that she will leave the company next month “to create space for others to pursue the work,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post. Her final day will be May 30. Afterward, Pineau said she plans to take “some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”
Pineau has led Meta’s Fundamental A.I. Research (FAIR) team since 2023. Her team oversees A.I. efforts across the company and is focused on achieving advanced forms of A.I. that demonstrate capabilities rivaling those of humans. It was founded over a decade ago with support from Meta’s chief A.I. scientist Yann LeCun, who led the lab for five years before shifting to a more research-focused role as Meta’s chief A.I. scientist..
In a statement to CNBC, Meta thanked Joelle for helping “push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”
The FAIR team was behind the development of Llama, Meta’s family of open-source large language models (LLMs)—the only major open-source alternative to proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT and Google (GOOGL)’s Gemini. Meta is expected to share more updates on its open-source A.I. strategy at LlamaCon, its first developer conference dedicated to generative A.I., scheduled for April 29. The company aims to reach 1 billion monthly users this year for its Llama-powered Meta AI virtual assistant.
Other projects spearheaded by the team include PyTorch, the popular machine learning framework, and Audiobox, an audio-generating A.I. model.
In line with industry peers such as Google and OpenAI, Meta has sharply increased its investment in A.I. development. The company plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year alone. “going to be intense,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January.
That investment includes massive infrastructure expansions, such as a planned 4-million-square-foot data center in Louisiana and a plan to double Meta’s graphics processing units (GPUs) to 1.3 million.
Pineau’s departure concludes an eight-year tenure at Meta. She joined the company in 2017 to lead an A.I. lab in Montreal and remains a professor of computer science at McGill University, where she co-directs the school’s reasoning and learning lab. She is also a member of the Mila Quebec A.I. Institute.