Meta Platforms’ (META) head of artificial intelligence (A.I.) research has announced she is leaving the technology giant.
Joëlle Pineau, a Canadian computer scientist and Meta’s vice-president of A.I. research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the company will be May 30.
The resignation comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made A.I. the company’s top priority, pledging to spend as much as $65 billion U.S. on the technology over the next year.
Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an A.I. assistant with more than one billion users and artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions independent of humans.
In her social media post, Pineau said, “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best A.I. systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”
Pineau was one of Meta’s top A.I. researchers and led the company’s fundamental A.I. research unit, known internally at the company as “FAIR,” since 2023.
She also oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science studies, some of which are incorporated into Meta’s apps.
A Canadian citizen, Pineau first joined Meta Platforms in 2017 to lead the company’s Montreal-based A.I. research lab.
She is also a computer science professor at McGill University in Montreal, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.
Meta Platforms’ stock has risen 18% over the last 12 months to trade at $586 U.S. per share.
