Meta's ex-AI chief warned Alexandr Wang is incompetent! Users are now facing the wrath

In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a deal that valued the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and came with a prize far more important to Mark Zuckerberg than the equity: Scale AI's 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, who stepped down from his own company to lead Meta's new Superintelligence Labs.

A year later, the case that this was Meta's worst-ever hire is being made by Meta's own former chief AI scientist.

‘Inexperienced’ — From The Man Who Used To Have The Job

Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning researcher known as one of AI's ‘godfathers’ and Meta's chief AI scientist until his own exit, told the Financial Times that Wang was ‘young’ and ‘inexperienced,’ adding bluntly that Wang had ‘no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it.’ LeCun made his own abrupt exit from Meta in November 2025 after being placed in a reporting line under Wang.

LeCun didn't stop at a personal critique of Wang. He dismissed the technical direction of Wang's new hires as ‘completely LLM-pilled,’ arguing that large language models are ‘a dead end when it comes to superintelligence’ — a direct challenge to the entire premise Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on. He also predicted the departures wouldn't stop: ‘A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave.'

The Exodus LeCun Predicted

That prediction has been borne out. Joelle Pineau, vice president of Meta's AI research group, announced her own departure. Three high-profile researchers — Avi Verma, Ethan Knight, and Rishabh Agarwal — left within months of joining, with some never formally starting. In the weeks immediately following the Superintelligence Labs announcement, at least eight researchers, engineers, and product leaders associated with Meta's AI operation departed altogether, headed variously to OpenAI, Anthropic, and AI materials-science startup Periodic Labs.

Meta's public position has been to describe this turnover as normal for an organisation of its size, and the company has since pushed back on separate reports that Zuckerberg had sidelined Wang, calling those reports false. Meta has also reportedly frozen its aggressive AI hiring push after a summer recruitment spree.

Zuckerberg's Own Leaked Admission

Underneath the personnel turmoil, leaked internal audio has surfaced twice this year, and neither instance flatters the state of Meta's AI push under Wang's leadership.

The first, a recording from an April 2026 town hall reported on by The Register and Common Dreams, captured Zuckerberg defending a program called the Model Capability Initiative — software installed on employees' work laptops that logged keystrokes, clicks, and periodic screenshots specifically to feed employee work patterns into Meta's AI training data, with no opt-out for staff on company-issued devices. More than 1,600 employees signed an internal petition against it, and staff in the UK launched a unionisation drive. Meta paused the programme on June 22 after an internal security review found the collected material — including private conversations — sitting exposed and accessible across roughly 45,000 internal database tables.

The second leak, from a closed-door town hall on July 2, has Zuckerberg telling employees directly that Meta's AI push ‘hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected' over the preceding four months — an admission, in his own words, that the initiative he restructured his entire AI division and paid $14.3 billion to accelerate isn't moving at the pace he promised investors.

Why This Matters Beyond The Org Chart

This is the same leadership and the same AI division now asking small businesses to hand over customer service and sales conversations to Meta's AI Business Agent, and the same company whose AI systems have separately been documented wrongly banning business accounts with no meaningful appeal and generating basic errors in ad creative.

A company can survive losing individual researchers. What's harder to shake off is a founder-CEO's own leaked admission that the AI strategy he bet the company's next decade on hasn't accelerated as promised — delivered by the person he chose to run it, a year after his own former chief scientist called that choice inexperienced and predicted the exodus that followed.