Joelle Pineau has announced her plan to step down from her high-profile position as the head and vice president of the artificial intelligence (AI) research division at the U.S. tech giant Meta.
Pineau has announced her plan on her LinkedIn post on Tuesday, stating that “Today, as the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work.”
She further added that she will leave the firm at the end of May after serving eight years with the company. Under her leadership, the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) has advanced in voice translation, image recognition, and Meta’s open-source large language model, Llama.
Pineau made this announcement just before Meta’s big AI conference, LlamaCon, on April 29 and at a time when there is a massive competition in AI among different companies.
According to reports, Pineau has developed leading open-source AI systems. Further, she was also a part of a big AI program called Llama. She is the key person showing how Meta openly shares its AI work with others.
In 2023, she took charge of Meta’s AI research team, called Facebook AI Research. This team was started 10 years earlier, in 2013, by a group that included a renowned AI expert named Yann LeCun. Yann led the team until 2018, when he stepped down from that role.
Even though he’s not the director anymore, he still works at Meta as their top AI scientist. So, Pineau is now leading the group that Yann helped create and used to run.
Additionally, Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Recently, on March 18th, Meta celebrated 1 billion downloads of its AI model Llama. However, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, didn’t instantly react to an emailed request for a remark about the move. Further, Pineau has not announced her replacement at the firm.
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