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The head of artificial intelligence (AI) research at Meta Platforms has announced departure plans despite the company’s push to be a major player in the AI space.
Joelle Pineau, who has led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Group (FAIR) since 2023, joined Meta in 2017 but has now decided to leave the company and allow Meta to grow with someone new.
“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,” wrote Pineau in a post to LinkedIn.
“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.”
During Pineau’s time at Meta, she worked on a number of major Meta programs such as Dino, SAM, Codegen, Audiobox, Llama, Pytorch, FAISS and Roberta.
“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,” she said.
Pineau said that her last day at Meta will be 30 May, after which she will take a break before “jumping into a new adventure”.
It is unclear if Pineau will continue as a pioneer of AI technology for another tech giant.
Earlier this year, reports suggested that Meta was working to compete with the big AI players with its own standalone application.
However, to differentiate itself from the other big players like OpenAI, xAI, and DeepSeek, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta’s AI endeavours will focus heavily on social interaction, the basis of Meta’s products.
At this stage, Meta AI is an inbuilt product in its services, such as Facebook Messenger.
However, Meta AI has not been without its controversy. Last year, Meta AI was called out for scraping Australian data for AI development without providing an opt-out option.
Despite offering the opt-out option to its European users, the company revealed that it scrapes the data from all public Facebook accounts.
Meta’s global privacy director, Melinda Claybaugh, initially rejected the claim that it scrapes Australian data to build its AI following questions by Labor Senator Tony Sheldon.
However, after further questioning by Greens Senator David Shoebridge, Claybaugh confirmed that data from public accounts was being scraped.
“The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?” asked Senator Shoebridge, to which Claybaugh responded, “correct”.
While Claybaugh did then confirm that accounts of under 18-year-olds would not be scraped, following questioning by Senator Sheldon asking if public photos of his children on his account would be scraped, Claybaugh said yes.
The Meta privacy director also admitted that the opt-out options were not available to Australian users, and the only mechanisms available locally were to make accounts private.
Claybaugh also said that the reason the opt-out option was available in the EU was in response to uncertainty regarding EU privacy laws.
“In Europe, there is an ongoing legal question around what is the interpretation of existing privacy law with respect to AI training,” said Claybaugh.
“We have paused launching our AI products in Europe while there is a lack of certainty. So you are correct that we are offering an opt-out to users in Europe. I will say that the ongoing conversation in Europe is the direct result of the existing regulatory landscape.”
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