Meta Loses Head of Fundamental AI Research

Meta✴’s VP of AI research Joelle Pineau has announced her departure from the company. Her last day at Meta✴ is set for May 30, 2025. The departure comes amid the company’s aggressive AI investment strategy, aimed at outpacing OpenAI and Google.

Image source: Farhat Altaf / Unsplash

Pino announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, where she confirmed that she would be leaving Meta✴. She served as the company’s vice president of AI research and has led the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division since 2023. FAIR is engaged in fundamental developments in the field of AI, some of which are subsequently implemented in Meta✴’s key digital products.

Pino’s departure coincided with a technological rethink within the company. Meta✴ CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a priority and invested billions of dollars in it. According to him, Meta✴ aims to create an AI assistant that will be used by more than one billion people, as well as to develop so-called strong AI (Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI), that is, AI systems that can think and act like humans.

In her statement, Pino said that amid global changes and the accelerating race in AI, she believes it makes sense to “make space for others.” She added that she will watch events unfold from the sidelines, knowing that the Meta✴ team has what it takes to build efficient and ethically sustainable AI systems that can integrate into the daily lives of billions of people.

Pineau joined Meta✴ in 2017 to lead the Montreal-based AI research lab. She is also a professor of computer science at McGill University, where she is co-director of the Learning and Inference Lab. Among the projects Pineau oversees are the LLaMA family of open-source language models, as well as PyTorch, a Python machine learning framework for AI developers. The work she has led has spanned cutting-edge areas of computer science and has subsequently informed Meta✴’s technology solutions.

Pino’s announcement comes weeks before the annual LlamaCon conference on April 29, where Meta✴ is expected to unveil the next version of its large-scale LLaMA language model. The company’s chief product officer Chris Cox said LLaMA 4 will be the foundation for a new generation of AI agents. The company also plans to release a standalone app for the Meta✴ AI chatbot, according to CNBC. Given these developments, Pino’s departure is especially significant given her key role in shaping the FAIR research field.