Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) Joelle Pineau has announced that she will step down at the end of May, marking the end of her eight-year tenure at the company. Her departure comes just ahead of Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon AI conference on April 29, an event focused on showcasing the company’s AI advancements. Pineau, who has been instrumental in shaping Meta’s artificial intelligence research and its open-source approach, shared her decision in a social media post on Tuesday, April 1.
“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 wrote in a Facebook post.
Pineau has not named a successor, and Meta has yet to comment on the leadership transition.
Based in Montreal, where she also serves as a computer science professor at McGill University, Pineau has been a key advocate for Meta’s open-source AI initiatives. Under her leadership, the company developed Llama, a flagship large language model that allows researchers and developers to access and modify its core components.
Pineau took charge of Meta’s AI research division in 2023, succeeding a group that originally included pioneering AI scientist Yann LeCun. LeCun, who co-founded the division—formerly known as Facebook AI Research—stepped down as its director in 2018 but remains Meta’s chief AI scientist.
Here’s what Meta AI head wrote in the post
A time of change
After nearly 8 years at Meta, time has come to say farewell. Or as we say in Montréal, l’heure est venue d’accrocher mes patins.
This has been the professional experience of a lifetime!
I arrived at Meta in May 2017, thrilled to be joining forces with some of the world’s best AI researchers, with the simple goal of solving AI and open-sourcing our research to accelerate innovation through the broader eco-system.
Fast-forward to today, I am surrounded by the most inspiring and dedicated team, focused on our goal of achieving Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI). Through the years, we created and nurtured dozens of projects that are now household names at Meta, used by dozens of teams to build better products: PyTorch, FAISS, Roberta, Dino, Llama, SAM, Codegen, Audiobox, …. And along the way, our world-class research has also made its way into the labs and homes of millions of researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, tinkerers, teachers, students, and many others.
I have nothing but admiration and deep gratitude for each of my managers during my time at Meta, Michael Schroepfer, Jerome Pesenti, Michael Abrash, Chris Cox. Each of them generously took me under their wing, provided context, advice, support, cover, feedback, sponsorship – and an inspiring model of leadership, each in their own way.
I have so much affection and appreciation for my close team, the FAIR Leads, all the FAIR researchers, our cross-function partners and many close collaborators. You have been there every day of this journey, trying to reinvent the world with me, by charting a path for the future of AI.
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. I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.
My last day will be May 30. After that I will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.