Meta loses its AI research head, as billions in investments hang in the balance
Meta's AI research head, Joelle Pineau is leaving amid major AI investments.
Pineau's exit complicates Meta's competition with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.
Meta aims to make Llama the industry standard and reach a billion chatbot users.
Meta's head of artificial intelligence research, Joelle Pineau, is leaving the company at a time when the tech giant is pouring billions into AI development to keep pace with industry rivals.
Pineau, who joined Meta in 2017 and served as Vice President of AI Research and leader of Meta's Fundamental AI Research group (FAIR), announced her departure on Tuesday on LinkedIn.
"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. "I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world." Her last day will be May 30.
"We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. "She's been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them." They did not answer a question about whether Meta had already started looking for a successor.
Pineau, will continue teaching computer science at McGill University in Montreal, a role she also held during her time at Meta. She wrote on LinkedIn that she will take time "to observe and reflect" after leaving. She led roughly 1,000 people across 10 locations at the company.
Pineau's departure complicates Meta's efforts to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's xAI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has prioritized AI at Meta, committing as much as $65 billion to related projects this year.
Llama, Meta's open-source large language model that competes with proprietary models from other companies, has been a key initiative for the company. Zuckerberg aims to make Llama the industry standard worldwide and believes Meta's AI chatbot, available across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, could reach a billion users this year. As of December, 600 million users accessed Meta AI 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 into Meta's various 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 a Financial Times interview. She said she joined Meta because "it was pretty obvious that a lot of the biggest innovation in AI was going to happen in industry" and added that she didn't interview anywhere else because "Meta was the only [company] that had a commitment to open science and open research."
Pineau's departure comes amid other leadership changes at Meta. The company recently lost two other senior executives: Dan Neary, vice president for Asia-Pacific Meta's largest market, and Kate Hamill, managing director for retail and e-commerce in North America, who had spent more than a decade at the company.Read the original article on Business Insider
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
Why you need a personal brand in a crowded job market
Back in 2023, social media management platform Buffer wrote a blog post about how it had received 1,518 applicants for a single role on its marketing team. While that's a jaw-dropping number, it's a common occurrence for companies with well-paying jobs that boast a great company culture. In the present job market, many job seekers are discouraged knowing they're competing against hundreds (if not thousands) of applicants. For some roles, a résumé will only get you so far. A personal brand helps you stand out before you ever apply for a job, making the application process tip in your favor. You can break out of the résumé mold Résumés often have very prescriptive formats. You've probably heard the common advice: Keep it to one page, highlight your accomplishments, make it easy to read. These days, résumés are often fed directly into an applicant tracking system—so any creativity is stripped, and a résumé reviewer only sees text. Yet many companies have a required field on their applications: the URL of your LinkedIn profile. This is where you can shine. Anyone can have a polished headshot, colorful banner, and interesting headline. But you can set yourself apart with a compelling 'About' section, links to projects in the 'Featured' section, and recommendations from former colleagues. Your LinkedIn profile is like your résumé with a microphone. Instead of passively waiting for someone to review your work, you're amplifying it. Of course, to do this, you need to create content. Start with a small, manageable posting schedule LinkedIn can be a very intimidating place, especially if you've never shared content there before. The feed is full of people who are 'Excited to announce' a new job or want to tell you how to '10x your career.' One Gen Z user referred to LinkedIn as 'the overachievers' Facebook' in an article for the New York Post. Creating content is a way to showcase your personality in a way that your résumé and profile can't. You don't have to set out to be an influencer, but you can share relevant experiences from your career—and even a peek into your personal interests (if you're comfortable doing so). I started with one post per week, sharing anything work-related that popped into my head. I had no particular goal in mind, but recognized that LinkedIn was the platform where work and opportunities happen. Eventually, I started becoming more strategic and shared content that showcased my expertise and personality, but not until my weekly writing habit was well-established. You can bypass gatekeepers and make connections A personal brand will open doors in a way that a résumé won't. In an intense job market, you need anything and everything that distinguishes you from other job seekers. With a personal brand, you can make connections with potential hiring managers and rely on those connections when applying for a job. Do this before you apply. Start connecting with people in your industry or at companies you'd like to work for. Engage with them and continue posting content. When a role opens up, you can apply and also send a DM saying: 'Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I applied for XYZ role. Really excited about the opportunity.' It might move your résumé to the top of the pile. Significant attention A personal brand might also bring offers directly to you—without needing to apply. You might catch the attention of hiring managers or recruiters who will reach out with potential opportunities. I'm self-employed, so my experience isn't the same as a traditional job seeker. Still, I can attest that I get a significant amount of attention on LinkedIn after several years of building a personal brand. Connections have brought opportunities my way that I would not have had otherwise. Because of my content, people know who I am, understand what I do, and trust that my personal brand matches my work ethic.
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
Vibe coding lets anyone write software—but comes with risks
Whether you're streaming a show, paying bills online or sending an email, each of these actions relies on computer programs that run behind the scenes. The process of writing computer programs is known as coding. Until recently, most computer code was written, at least originally, by human beings. But with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, that has begun to change. Just as you can ask ChatGPT to spin up a recipe for a favorite dish or write a sonnet in the style of Lord Byron, now you can ask generative AI tools to write computer code for you. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder who previously led AI efforts at Tesla, recently termed this ' vibe coding.' For complete beginners or nontechnical dreamers, writing code based on vibes—feelings rather than explicitly defined information—could feel like a superpower. You don't need to master programming languages or complex data structures. A simple natural language prompt will do the trick. How it works Vibe coding leans on standard patterns of technical language, which AI systems use to piece together original code from their training data. Any beginner can use an AI assistant such as GitHub Copilot or Cursor Chat, put in a few prompts, and let the system get to work. Here's an example: 'Create a lively and interactive visual experience that reacts to music, user interaction, or real-time data. Your animation should include smooth transitions and colorful and lively visuals with an engaging flow in the experience. The animation should feel organic and responsive to the music, user interaction, or live data and facilitate an experience that is immersive and captivating. Complete this project using JavaScript or React, and allow for easy customization to set the mood for other experiences.' But AI tools do this without any real grasp of specific rules, edge cases, or security requirements for the software in question. This is a far cry from the processes behind developing production-grade software, which must balance trade-offs between product requirements, speed, scalability, sustainability, and security. Skilled engineers write and review the code, run tests, and establish safety barriers before going live. But while the lack of a structured process saves time and lowers the skills required to code, there are trade-offs. With vibe coding, most of these stress-testing practices go out the window, leaving systems vulnerable to malicious attacks and leaks of personal data. And there's no easy fix: If you don't understand every—or any—line of code that your AI agent writes, you can't repair the code when it breaks. Or worse, as some experts have pointed out, you won't notice when it's silently failing. The AI itself is not equipped to carry out this analysis either. It recognizes what 'working' code usually looks like, but it cannot necessarily diagnose or fix deeper problems that the code might cause or exacerbate. Why it matters Vibe coding could be just a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that will fizzle before long, but it may also find deeper applications with seasoned programmers. The practice could help skilled software engineers and developers more quickly turn an idea into a viable prototype. It could also enable novice programmers or even amateur coders to experience the power of AI, perhaps motivating them to pursue the discipline more deeply. Vibe coding also may signal a shift that could make natural language a more viable tool for developing some computer programs. If so, it would echo early website editing systems known as WYSIWYG editors that promised designers 'what you see is what you get,' or 'drag-and-drop' website builders that made it easy for anyone with basic computer skills to launch a blog. For now, I don't believe that vibe coding will replace experienced software engineers, developers, or computer scientists. The discipline and the art are much more nuanced than what AI can handle, and the risks of passing off 'vibe code' as legitimate software are too great. But as AI models improve and become more adept at incorporating context and accounting for risk, practices like vibe coding might cause the boundary between AI and human programmer to blur further.
Business Insider
2 hours ago
- Business Insider
I'm a Gen Zer who landed a 6-figure job at Morgan Stanley before graduation. Here's what the process was like — and why you should refresh a surprisingly important part of your résumé.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sara Thomas, 22, a 2025 graduate from the University of Chicago and incoming investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. Business Insider's recent " Path to Wall Street" series highlighted how finance careers continue to attract young talent, despite the industry's long hours and demanding entry-level roles. Entry-level bankers typically earn about $110,000 a year, not including bonuses. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I had barely decided on banking as a career choice when I had to start preparing for interviews. My experience was similar to most stories I've heard about the banking world: the recruiting process starts early. Before submitting my internship applications, I spoke to about five people at each major bank — mostly recent UChicago grads and people the university's career advancement program connected me with — so they would recognize my name when they saw my résumé. Cold LinkedIn messaging didn't work very well for me. Those introductions are often necessary to get an interview. At most banks, I interviewed for multiple rounds, including calls focused on my personality and technical skills and a two-hour " super day." The whole process lasted about two weeks. Then, by the spring of my sophomore year, I was done. I landed an internship at Morgan Stanley, and I knew my full-time job would be set as long as I got a return offer. My prior internships had been at Bain Capital and the Chicago-based firm Ariel Investments. The only other career trajectory I considered in college was academia. I studied economics and considered getting involved with economics research, but I realized it wasn't for me. I just work better in a faster-paced finance environment. In my free time at school, I tried to focus on clubs and internships that would keep me close to startups and entrepreneurship, so I joined a venture capital fund on campus. I was also involved in a campus group for women and minorities interested in finance and investing. Those opportunities really helped me build my industry chops. I would tell any college student hoping to land a Wall Street or Silicon Valley job: be decisive. Even if investment banking or consulting isn't your lifelong passion, plan to commit to a career path sooner rather than later, so that you can give yourself the most amount of time to prepare, network, and do really well in the interviews. And, for the application process, students need to be careful with what they put on their résumé — recruiters pay a lot of attention to the "skills and interests" section at the bottom. Don't say that you're a mountain climber if you have never climbed a mountain, because people will ask you about your hobbies, and you need to be able to genuinely talk about them. Of course, your credentials matter, but I've found that recruiters are most interested in meeting well-rounded people. Job applications and postgrad life make me anxious sometimes. I've leaned on my friends a lot: Some aren't going into finance, others have gone through recruiting alongside me. I'm also grateful for my family — my Morgan Stanley role will be in San Francisco, and it will be the first time I've moved far from home, since I grew up in Chicago. Exercise has always been a coping strategy for me, too. I'm trying to build healthy habits and make sure I don't isolate myself. Those are the main ways I'm dealing with stress. Long, long term, my biggest goal is to be able to work for myself in some way. That could mean working at a big company that gives me a lot of autonomy to make decisions or starting my own company, if I am brave enough to do that. For now, I'm excited to keep building my career and learning from my coworkers. Having engaging conversations with people you've never met can be the most challenging part of the finance industry, but it's also the most rewarding.
