A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg Wednesday that AI legend Yann LeCun is exiting Zuckland and striking out on his own. According to a Memo from LeCun himself that Bloomberg claims to have read, LeCun’s new endeavor is meant to “bring about the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.”
Sources apparently told Bloomberg that LeCun “clashed with others internally.” Meta had recently constructed a fully separate AI research department focused on generative AI, and in its latest story, Bloomberg now claims that Meta had begun to hide LeCun from view in favor of high-profile recent hires. Recent hires have invluded ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao.
As previously discussed here at Gizmodo, LeCun is fascinated by an area of AI called “world models.” He has spent more than a year saying he thinks LLM research, the backbone of systems like ChatGPT, is no longer a worthy area of pursuit—at least as far as hypothetical advanced AI functions with terms like “AGI” and “superintelligence” are concerned.
LeCun, who was born and raised in France, is among the handful of researchers often referred to as the “godfathers of AI,” or more specifically the godfathers of deep learning, and shared a Turing Award in 2019 with fellow godfathers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The influential cognitive scientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus is a longtime critic of LeCun, and their public disagreements go back years.
LeCun joined Meta in 2013, when it was still called Facebook, as the head of what at the time was a research operation with a location in New York that LeCun could walk to from his office at NYU, where he works as a professor. At the time, it wasn’t totally clear what a company like Facebook even wanted from a scientist who worked with deep neural networks. Another major AI researcher, Andrew Ng, explained Facebook’s hiring decision to Wired in terms that now seem sort of quaint and social media-centric:
“Machine learning is already used in hundreds of places throughout Facebook, ranging from photo tagging to ranking articles to your news feed. Better machine learning will be able to help improve all of these features, as well as help Facebook create new applications that none of us have dreamed of yet.”
After the 2022 release of ChatGPT led to AI’s rise to domination of all priorities in the tech world, LeCun became notable for his skepticism about the need for AI safety. He told the Wall Street Journal last year that the idea that AI poses a threat to humanity is “complete B.S.”
But LLMs aren’t LeCun’s cup of tea anyway. He clarified last month that he had almost no involvement with Meta’s Llama models, and that such generative AI-related work happened way off in another department at Meta. LeCun worked, he explained, in Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) department, and was attempting to go “beyond LLMs.”
LeCun believes AI models are needed that can comprehensively understand the physical world through sensory inputs like vision, and how to reason its way through interactions with, and changes to, that world. He thinks the current crop of AI systems can’t do anything even close to this, and that they are in fact dumber than cats.
You can already see the start of LeCun’s world model research under the aegis of Meta in V-JEPA-2. That model is trained not on text, but on videos of the physical world, and designed not simply to replicate all that video, like Sora, but to model the causes and effects of actions in the world when things move around and interact. That’s the theory anyway.
Bloomberg writes that Meta “plans to partner with LeCun on his startup, though details are still being finalized.” In LeCun’s memo, he wrote that his former company “will be a partner of the new company and will have access to its innovations.”
It’s not at all clear yet how the partnership between LeCun’s new company and Meta will be structured, but tech companies are famous for being near inextricable from one another where AI is concerned. Microsoft owns about 27% of OpenAI, and has special rights to use its technology. Google similarly owns 14% of Anthropic. The way interdependent investments in the AI world lead to higher valuations has been compared to “circular dealmaking.“
LeCun’s memo says his new technology “will have far-ranging applications in many sectors of the economy, some of which overlap with Meta’s commercial interests, but many of which do not.”
LeCun famously favors the term Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) in place of something like AGI (nota bene: “ami” is French for “friend”). In his memo, he reportedly wrote that “Pursuing the goal of AMI in an independent entity is a way to maximize its broad impact.” It’s an appropriately ambiguous turn of phrase. Presumably the “independent entity” is the new, non-Meta company, not an intelligent entity. Though he may mean that too.
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![Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out | TechCrunch
In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”
Coming from most people, that would sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.
Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and these days spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He turned up to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that mark so many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz reportedly netted Index roughly billion.
Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and two brothers gave million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now the Rimer Building, and found a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.
In the meantime, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, for giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, per a New York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Noted that piece: “Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses ‘are philanthropy.’”)
The pattern appears to hold beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record 2.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; roughly half do now, and Bank of America and Lilly Family School data shows even affluent-household giving has slipped, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, too, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were pledging to give away the bulk of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren’t building philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet.
Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax that targets the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason among others may be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.
As unsurprisingly, there is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth-redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle.
Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing AI’s upside with the public, but critics see it instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. Joked veteran investor Roelof Botha during a separate sit-down with this editor last year: “[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
It’s worth thinking through how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined .9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.
It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents an historic extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.
That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. But narrow the lens to the tippy top, and the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that same sliver of the population — now 19 households instead of four — is worth 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the peak of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a rich man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good within his own lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die wealthy. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
It didn’t hold off the other path for long, though. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving failed to adequately address the pressure building underneath it.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in tech. What’s more curious to him is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he traced to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.
What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.
Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared. But he’d rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting on people picking the easy one before history picks it for them.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Neil #Rimer #thinks #money #coming #TechCrunch](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-17-at-9.20.56-PM.png?resize=1200%2C739&ssl=1 "Neil Rimer thinks the AI money is coming back out | TechCrunch
In late May, Neil Rimer said something during a sit-down I had with him in Athens that I haven’t been able to shake. At a vibrant new tech festival in the city, talking about the wealth piling up around AI, he said he has “a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution.” He continued on. “It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,” he told me, adding that he thinks tech leaders “can play a leading role in seeing that through.”
Coming from most people, that would sound like standard-issue populism. Coming from Rimer, a co-founder of Index Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last three decades, it seemed a striking thing to say in public.
Rimer stepped back from day-to-day investing in 2021, and these days spends much of his time in Athens, where his wife is from and where his children treasure their Greek passports. He turned up to our interview in a rumpled button-down and jeans, not the quarter-zips and fine knitwear that mark so many of his peers. Yet Index’s returns in recent years have been exceptional: the firm has raised roughly billion from outside investors since its founding, and last year’s exits including Figma’s IPO and Google’s purchase of the cybersecurity firm Wiz reportedly netted Index roughly billion.
Rimer has found ways to give back. He sits on the board of Endeavor Greece, which mentors entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and chaired the board of Human Rights Watch from 2019 to 2025. In late 2021, he and his father and two brothers gave million to McGill University to renovate a campus building, now the Rimer Building, and found a new Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges.
In the meantime, his comment about redistribution comes at an odd moment, to be charitable, for giving. The Giving Pledge, the promise Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched in 2010 to get billionaires to commit half their fortunes to charity, is becoming increasingly irrelevant. One hundred and thirteen families signed in its first five years, then 72, then 43, then just four in all of 2024, per a New York Times report in March that underscored how out-of-fashion philanthropy has become among some of the richest people in tech. (Noted that piece: “Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses ‘are philanthropy.’”)
The pattern appears to hold beyond the Pledge. Total American charitable giving hit a record 2.5 billion in 2024, but the number of Americans actually giving has fallen for five straight years, down 4.5% in 2024 alone, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Two-thirds of households donated in 2000; roughly half do now, and Bank of America and Lilly Family School data shows even affluent-household giving has slipped, from 90% in 2017 to 81% last year.
The pattern shows up in Index’s own portfolio, too, which includes Anthropic. Business Insider recently asked a financial planner, Alex Caswell, whether his newly wealthy clients, many of them Anthropic employees tied to effective altruism, were pledging to give away the bulk of their fortunes. Anthropic matches employee donations of up to 25% of their equity to charity, and some of Caswell’s clients have used it, he told BI, but most weren’t building philanthropy into their plans at all; they were focused on angel investing or starting their own companies. “That’s what I’m seeing more than the desire to become philanthropic,” he told the outlet.
Unsurprisingly, the absence of voluntary giving is now running up against attempts to legislate the outcome instead. California voters will decide this year on a 5% one-time wealth tax that targets the state’s billionaires. Some, including Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have already moved their primary residences to South Florida to be on the safe side.
OpenAI is reportedly considering going public in 2027, and cynically, one reason among others may be that the tax, if passed, will calculate net worth based on an individual’s worldwide assets as of the end of this calendar year.
As unsurprisingly, there is plenty of opposition to any kind of wealth-redistribution measure of this scale, including by Governor Gavin Newsom, and including by economists who point out that many industrialized countries have repealed similar wealth taxes since 1990 after watching their wealthy residents skedaddle.
Other options on the table are as controversial. OpenAI has reportedly discussed handing the federal government a 5% equity stake, an idea CEO Sam Altman has framed as sharing AI’s upside with the public, but critics see it instead as a way to buy political cover in Washington. In either case, Silicon Valley has never been eager to put Uncle Sam on the cap table. Joked veteran investor Roelof Botha during a separate sit-down with this editor last year: “[Some] of the most dangerous words in the world are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
It’s worth thinking through how much wealth sits outside these mechanisms. Musk is worth just over trillion, after SpaceX’s IPO last month made him the first person to reach that mark. Forbes counted 45 new AI billionaires in its 2026 rankings alone, worth a combined .9 trillion, and that’s before either Anthropic or OpenAI has gone public. In that same BI story about Anthropic employees, BI notes that once Anthropic and OpenAI complete their IPOs, their combined employees will hold enough wealth to buy nearly a third of all homes in the San Francisco metro area.
It feels unprecedented, but whether it represents an historic extreme is a matter of some debate. The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit 31.7% in the third quarter of last year, a record since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, and roughly equal to what the other 90% of households outside the top decile held combined.
That’s still below the 45% the top 1% commanded at the Gilded Age peak in 1916. But narrow the lens to the tippy top, and the picture flips. Renowned economist Gabriel Zucman calculates that at the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, America’s four largest fortunes were worth a combined 4% of U.S. GDP. Today, that same sliver of the population — now 19 households instead of four — is worth 14%.
Rimer’s two paths, voluntary or forced, have precedent from the last time American wealth concentration reached this level. In 1889, at the peak of the first Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie published an essay arguing that a rich man should treat his fortune as a trust to be distributed for the public good within his own lifetime, calling it a disgrace to die wealthy. That essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” became the founding document of modern philanthropy and the intellectual ancestor of the Giving Pledge.
It didn’t hold off the other path for long, though. By the mid-1930s, Louisiana Senator Huey Long had built a national following behind a program called Share Our Wealth, demanding steep taxes on the rich to fund a guaranteed income for every American. Worried about losing working-class support to Long, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through what the press called the “soak-the-rich tax,” raising the top marginal income tax rate as high as 79%. It redistributed less than Long wanted, but it remains the clearest example in American history of politically forced redistribution arriving once voluntary giving failed to adequately address the pressure building underneath it.
None of this is news to Rimer, who has spent his career in tech. What’s more curious to him is “the moral center of tech companies,” a fascination he traced to being a Stanford undergrad in 1984, when Apple discounted the first Macintosh for students and Steve Jobs and Apple’s other founders were, in his words, “heroes” for building something he felt was genuinely good for the world.
What troubles him now, he said, is hearing his own children talk about certain tech companies the way an earlier generation talked about defense contractors or cigarette makers.
Critics may note that Rimer — as an investor in Anthropic and other tech companies — is a direct beneficiary of the windfall he says will eventually need to be shared. But he’d rather see his fellow beneficiaries choose to give some of the money back than have it taken from them. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way, and Rimer is betting on people picking the easy one before history picks it for them.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Neil #Rimer #thinks #money #coming #TechCrunch")
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