"and we didn't see anything" is not justified at all.
Meta absolutely has (or at least had) a word class industry AI lab and has published a ton of great work and open source models (granted their LLM open source stuff failed to keep up with chinese models in 2024/2025 ; their other open source stuff for thins like segmentation don't get enough credit though). Yann's main role was Chief AI Scientist, not any sort of product role, and as far as I can tell he did a great job building up and leading a research group within Meta.
He deserved a lot of credit for pushing Meta to very open to publishing research and open sourcing models trained on large scale data.
Just as one example, Meta (together with NYU) just published "Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03276) which has a ton of large-experiment backed insights.
Yann did seem to end up with a bit of an inflated ego, but I still consider him a great research lead. Context: I did a PhD focused on AI, and Meta's group had a similar pedigree as Google AI/Deepmind as far as places to go do an internship or go to after graduation.
For instance, under Yann's direction Meta FAIR produced the ESM protein sequence model, which is less hyped than AlphaFold, but has been incredibly influential. They achieved great performance without using multiple alignments as an input/inductive bias. This is incredibly important for large classes of proteins where multiple alignments are pretty much noise.
I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did.
Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers.
> Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers.
Speaking of returns - Apple absolutely fucked Meta ads with the privacy controls, which trashed ad performance, revenue and share price. Meta turned things around using AI, with Yann as the lead researcher. Are you willing to give him credit for that? Revenue is now greater than pre-Apple-data-lockdown
How much of Meta's increased revenue is attributed to AI? I think Meta "turned things around" by bypassing privacy controls [1].
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2025/08/21/meta-allegedly-bypassed-apple...
> I think Meta "turned things around" by bypassing privacy controls
Why would Apple be complicit on this for years?
Apple has allowed Facebook, TikTok etc. to track users across devices AND device resets via the iCloud Keychain API.
When you log into FB on any account on any device, then install FB on a new device, or even after you erase the device, they know it's you even before you log in. Because the info is tied to your Apple iCloud account.
And there's no way for users to see or delete what data other companies have stored and linked to your Apple ID via that API.
It's been like this for at least 5 years and nobody seems to care.
Is there a write up of this somewhere? Curious to read more...
None that I found. You can test it right now yourself. Install FB, log in, delete FB, reinstall FB. Your previous login info will be there.
That would be fine if users could SEE what has been stored and DELETE it WITHOUT going through the app and trusting it to show you everything honestly.
What's even worse is that it silently persists across DEVICE reinstalls.
Erase and reset your iPhone/iPad. Sign into the same iCloud account. Reinstall FB. Your login info will still be there.
Buy a new iPhone/iPad. Sign into the same iCloud account. Reinstall FB. Your login info will still be there.
And nope, no one seems to care.
>> but he had access to many more resources in Meta, and we didn't see anything
> I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did.
You were criticising his output at Facebook, though, but he was in the research group at facebook, not a product group, so it seems like we did actually see lots of things?
they are not expecting returns at 1B+, just for some one to pay more than they paid six months ago
They're expecting what you promised them when they handed over the money. That is "more money" for most investors but that isn't the sole universal human objective. Money has to serve an instrumental purpose and if one of your purposes is something that can't currently be achieved, simply getting more money won't help. You need to give that money to some venture that might actually be able to achieve it. I have no doubt there are at least a few very rich people out there who just have sci-fi nerd dreams and want to see someone go to Mars, go to Jupiter, discover alien life, rebuild dinosaurs, or create a truly autonomous entirely new form of artificial life just to see if they can. If it makes money, great. If it doesn't, what else was I going to do? Die with $60 billion in the bank instead of $40 billion?