Meta Platforms’ (META) head of artificial intelligence (AI) research has resigned from the company.
Joëlle Pineau, the company’s vice-president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be on May 30. The resignation comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, pledging to spend as much as $65 billion on the technology over the next year.
Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI 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 on their own independent of human intervention.
Cheering from the Sidelines
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 AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”
Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, known internally at the company as “FAIR,” since 2023. She 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 AI research lab. She is also a computer science professor at McGill University in Canada, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.
Is META Stock a Buy?
The stock of Meta Platforms has a consensus Strong Buy rating among 48 Wall Street analysts. That rating is based on 44 Buy, three Hold, and one Sell recommendations issued in the past three months. The average META price target of $761.41 implies 30.82% upside from current levels.
