Meta’s artificial intelligence head of artificial intelligence Joelle Pineau leaves the company at a time when the technology giant pays billions in the development of AI to keep up with the rhythm of industry rivals.
Pineau, who joined Meta in 2017 and was vice-president of IA research and head of the Fundamental Group of Research on Meta IA (Fair), announced his departure on Linkedin on Tuesday.
“Today, while the world is undergoing an important change, while the AI race is accelerating, and while Meta is preparing for its next chapter, it is time to create a space so that others continue the work,” she wrote. “I will encourage the key line, knowing that you have all the ingredients necessary to build the best AI systems in the world.” His last day will take place on May 30.
“We thank Joelle for his Fair leadership,” Meta spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. “It was an important voice for open source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and science behind them.” They did not answer a question of whether Meta had already started to look for a successor.
Pineau, will continue to teach IT at McGill University in Montreal, a role she also occupied during her stay in Meta. She wrote on LinkedIn that she would take the time “to observe and think” after her departure. It led around 1,000 people out of 10 locations in the company.
Pineau’s departure complicates Meta’s efforts to compete with rivals like Openai, Anthropic and Elon Musk. CEO Mark Zuckerberg prioritized AI in Meta, hiring up to $ 65 billion in related projects this year.
Lama, the Meta’s large open source language model which competes with the models of other companies, was a key initiative for the company. Zuckerberg aims to make Llama the norm of industry worldwide and believes that the Meta chatbot, available on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, could reach a billion users this year. In December, 600 million users reached Meta IA each month.
Last year, the company reorganized its AI teams to place Pineau and Fair closer to the product division to accelerate the implementation of research on the various Meta products.
Pineau has been interested in AI for over 25 years. As a student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, she worked on a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots, according to an interview with the Financial Times. She said that she had joined Meta because “it was quite obvious that a large part of the greatest innovation in AI was going to perform in the industry” and added that she had not interviewed elsewhere because “Meta was the only one (company) who undertook to open science and open research”.
Pineau’s departure comes in the middle of other leadership changes in Meta. The company recently lost two other senior executives: Dan Neary, vice-president of the largest Meta Asia-Pacific market, and Kate Hamill, Director General of Retail and Electronic Trade in North America, who had spent more than a decade in society.
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