As Meta (Meta) prepares to invest tens of thousands of dollars in the competition to develop artificial intelligence, the company is losing one of its most influential researchers. Joelle Pineau, head of AI Research at Meta, announced yesterday (April 1) that she will leave the company next month to “create space for others to pursue the job,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post. Her last day will be May 30th. Afterward, Pinano said she plans to “spend some time to observe and reflect before starting a new adventure.”
Pineau has led Meta’s Basic AI Research (FAIR) team since 2023. Her team is responsible for overseeing AI’s work at the company-wide level and focuses on realizing advanced forms of AI to demonstrate that capabilities are comparable to those of humans. It was founded a decade ago, with the support of Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann Lecun, who led the lab for five years before moving to a more research role among Meta’s chief AI scientist.
In a statement to CNBC, Meta thanked Joelle for helping “to drive breakthroughs in our products and the science behind them.”
Behind the expo team is the development of Llama of Meta Open Source Big Word Model (LLMS), the only major open source alternative to proprietary models such as Openai’s GPT and Google’s (Googl’s) Gemini. META is expected to share more updates to its open source AI strategy at Llamacon, which is its first developer meeting to generate AI, scheduled on April 29. The company aims to use the Meta AI Virtual Assistant, which is driving everywhere every month this year.
Other projects led by the team include Pytorch, the popular machine learning framework, and AudioBox (AudioObox), an audio-generated AI model.
In line with industry peers such as Google and OpenAI, Meta has dramatically increased its investment in AI development. The company plans to spend only between $60 billion and $65 billion this year. “Keep it intense,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January.
The investment includes massive infrastructure expansions, such as Louisiana’s planned 4 million square foot data center, and plans to double the Meta Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to two hundred thousand.
Pineau left for eight years in Yuanzhong. She joined the company in 2017, leading the AI lab at Montreal and remains a professor of computer science at McGill University, where she coaches with the school’s reasoning and learning lab. She is also a member of the Mila Quebec AI Institute.
