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Meta’s AI chief scientist leaves with parting shots

PLUS: The Rundown's 2026 AI predictions

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Acclaimed AI chief scientist Yann LeCun just departed Meta after over a decade, and the outspoken researcher definitely didn’t leave quietly.

From calling his boss Alexandr Wang "inexperienced" to admitting Llama 4 benchmarks were "fudged," LeCun’s parting shots in a candid interview encapsulate the tension between Meta's old guard and new AI direction.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • LeCun blasts Meta's AI leadership on way out

  • The Rundown Roundtable: Our 2026 AI predictions

  • Create Claude Skill to design YouTube thumbnails

  • Grok faces backlash over ‘undressing’ AI capabilities

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

YANN LECUN & META

Image source: Nano Banana Pro / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta's outgoing chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, just shed light on his new AI startup and criticized Meta in an FT interview, calling Alexandr Wang "inexperienced" and predicting more departures from the company’s GenAI team.

The details:

  • LeCun called Wang, who was elevated to run Meta's Superintelligence Labs after the $14B Scale AI deal, "young" and lacking research experience.

  • He also admitted Llama 4 benchmarks were "fudged a little bit," with Zuckerberg reportedly losing confidence in the entire GenAI org.

  • LeCun said Meta's new AI hires are "completely LLM-pilled," while he maintains LLMs are a "dead end" for achieving superintelligence.

  • Lecun revealed that he will be the ‘executive chair’ of his new AMI venture, with French AI healthcare startup Nabla’s founder Alex LeBrun leading as CEO.

Why it matters: The tension between Meta’s old guard and new hires has been felt since this summer’s re-org, and LeCun has always been outspoken… But these are serious statements to make publicly. Only time will tell if Zuck, Alexandr Wang, and co’s new direction ends up proving him right — or makes him look out of touch.

TOGETHER WITH GURU

The Rundown: Guru is the AI Source of Truth that connects all of your company’s tools and delivers cited, permission-aware answers everywhere you work. With one governed knowledge layer powering both your people and your AIs, teams move faster — with fewer blind spots and mistakes.

Guru allows you to:

  • Connect all knowledge with permission-aware access

  • Get trusted, cited answers in chat and everywhere else you work

  • Experience knowledge that improves and verifies itself

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives. In today’s first edition of 2026, we’re giving our industry predictions for the year ahead.

Rowan, Founder & CEO: Google finally nails the integration of AI into its existing products (Gmail, Search, YouTube, Android) and starts gaining a lead over OAI in total AI users. ChatGPT remains the dominant chatbot, but Google dominates all other AI capabilities (integrating with existing products, video, and image gen).

Jason, Developer: We see our first major AI drug moment, and the tech stops being a cool lab demo and becomes a boring, repeatable way to produce drug candidates. I'm not saying AI cures cancer, but an AI-first candidate gets a big Phase 3 launch or something similar, which prompts the wave of “AI discovery stack” across pharma.

Zach, AI Writer: One of the major Western labs declares a new release as AGI in 2026, though the term has been so overused and distorted that everyone continues to argue over definitions. The “AGI” model is an upgrade, but nothing world-shaking — and life goes on much like after other invisible broken milestones like the Turing Test.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a custom Claude Skill that automatically generates branded YouTube thumbnails by analyzing top-performing videos and applying your brand guidelines.

Step-by-step:

  1. Go to Claude Settings → Capabilities, enable Code execution & file creation, then toggle skill-creator under Skills and click Try in Chat

  2. Start a chat, upload your logo, and prompt: “Create a skill that generates high-CTR YouTube thumbnails. It should analyze video links, use the PIL library, place the logo top-right, and use Black, White, and Blue”

  3. Download the generated ZIP, then go to Profile → Settings → Capabilities → Upload Skill and install the skill

  4. Start a new chat and prompt: “Generate a YouTube thumbnail for ‘AI Productivity Tools 2025’. Here are the top videos: [paste URLs]. Create a high-CTR thumbnail with the logo top-right using brand colors”

Pro tip: Refine the thumbnails with follow-ups or use this approach to create Skills for other productivity tasks, such as presentation generation.

PRESENTED BY CONCIERGE

The Rundown: Today’s buyers use AI every day to answer their questions, and have no patience for a scavenger hunt on your website. Concierge is a custom Perplexity-style answer engine, trained on your company’s content, that lives on your website and delivers accurate, personalized responses to ultra-specific questions.

Modern brands use Concierge to:

  • Handle any buyer question (no matter how technical) with advanced RAG on your content & media

  • Control and visibility over every conversation, with guardrails and sentiment analysis

  • Build trust with website visitors before they are willing to commit to a demo

Use Concierge to turn every question into an opportunity. 

XAI & GROK

Image source: X / The Rundown

The Rundown: xAI’s Grok is facing criticism and government action from multiple countries after complying with users’ requests to edit images of women and minors in revealing fashion — a trend that has become prevalent throughout the platform.

The details:

  • X has been flooded with users prompting Grok to digitally undress people using the model’s AI editing capabilities, with some requests involving minors.

  • Musk said users making illegal content with Grok "will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content."

  • France, India, Malaysia, and the UK have all condemned the outputs, with France calling them "clearly illegal" under the EU's Digital Services Act.

  • The X @Safety account posted a similar statement as Musk, saying it will work to remove, permanently suspend accounts, and work with law enforcement.

Why it matters: Grok’s less restrictive behavior has been marketed as a feature, but we’re now witnessing one of the first viral results of giving powerful, unrestricted AI editing powers to the masses — and it’s ugly. While Musk and X talk of taking action, anonymous accounts and a global userbase make that a tall task.

QUICK HITS

  • ⚙️ Claude Code - Anthropic’s deep-context agentic AI coding tool

  • 🌌 Grok Imagine - xAI's image and video generation platform

  • 🎥 Kling 2.6 - Featuring Motion Control for precise character animation

  • 🏷️ Shopify SimGym - Simulate buyer behavior with AI shoppers

Google Principal Engineer Jaana Dogan shared that Claude Code replicated in one hour what her team spent a year trying to build.

Elon Musk responded to a post from Midjourney founder David Holz on AI coding development, declaring that “we have entered the Singularity”.

Prime Intellect published research on Recursive Language Models, an approach allowing AI agents to manage their memory to enable tasks spanning weeks/months.

Anthropic is purchasing as many as 1M of Google’s TPUv7 AI chips from Broadcom, with the Ironwood chip line continuing to gain ground as an alternative to Nvidia.

xAI released a new upgrade to its Grok Imagine creative platform, with Elon Musk revealing that there will be “another major upgrade” in 3 weeks.

COMMUNITY

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Suvankar in Australia:

"I received a bread-maker for Christmas. I use AI to work alongside me as a diagnostic partner rather than just handing my recipes, translating what I see, feel, and smell into small, controlled adjustments that steadily improve results. Each bake builds on the last. We observe dough behaviour early, interpret it through simple baking science, then change only one or two variables at a time so that cause and effect stay clear.

This turns the machine from a black box into a predictable tool, helps me develop repeatable house recipes, and gives me the confidence to correct a loaf instinctively."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

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Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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