Joelle Pineau steps down as Meta's AI research leader after eight years
Joelle Pineau, Meta’s Vice President of AI Research and leader of the company’s Fundamental AI Research group (FAIR), has announced she is leaving the company after nearly eight years.
In a post on LinkedIn, Pineau said she is stepping down from her role at the end of May as Meta prepares for its next chapter in the development of artificial intelligence.
Pineau, who joined Facebook in 2017, says she believes Meta has the potential to build leading AI systems. She did not elaborate on her reasons for leaving, but said “the time has come for me to step aside.”
A Meta spokesperson thanked Pineau for her work, particularly in the advancement of open-source initiatives and breakthroughs in the field of AI.
Pineau had been leading a team of about 1,000 people across ten locations. She was pivotal in projects like Llama, Meta’s open-source language model designed to set an industry standard. It is all part of a broader strategy to infuse AI into the very fabric of its platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Meta is spending big on this vision, committing $60 to $65 billion to AI-related projects this year. The competition is fierce though, with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic leading the charge.
Pineau is the latest in a long line of leadership changes at Meta in recent months. Dan Neary and Kate Hamill are among the other high-profile exits. The company is already on the lookout for her replacement, but none has been named yet.
In her post, Pineau says she’ll continue her work teaching computer science at McGill University in Montreal. She reflects on a two-decade career in AI that began with her work on a voice recognition system at the University of Waterloo.
