Meta's chief AI scientist maps his exit

PLUS: Use AI as your personal tutor to learn anything

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The tension between Meta's AI old guard and its flashy new hires has been rippling through the company, but a coming departure may cause the biggest wave yet.

AI pioneer and Chief Scientist Yann LeCun is reportedly planning to leave for his own world models startup, turning the company's internal battle into a real-world test of competing visions for AI's future.

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Meta’s Chief AI Scientist plans to exit

  • ElevenLabs’ celeb AI voice licensing platform

  • Use AI as a personal tutor to learn anything

  • SoftBank cuts Nvidia shares to go ‘all-in’ on OpenAI

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

Image source: Reve / The Rundown

The Rundown: Longtime Meta Chief AI Scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun is reportedly planning to leave the company, with fundraising talks and plans already underway to launch his own startup based around developing world models.

The details:

  • According to FT, LeCun has told colleagues he plans to leave Meta in the coming months, ending his run leading the company’s FAIR arm since 2013.

  • LeCun's upcoming venture will reportedly focus on world models that learn from video and spatial data rather than text-based systems.

  • LeCun began reporting to Alexandr Wang as part of Meta’s massive AI restructure, with friction this summer between FAIR and the new direction.

  • Meta recently cut around 600 positions from its AI divisions, which included FAIR but not the recently formed TBD Lab overseen by Wang.

Why it matters: This coming departure is… not a surprise. There has been tension between Meta’s old guard and new hires throughout the reorg, and LeCun’s AI critiques are constantly at odds with Meta’s new AI direction. Time will tell if the upcoming venture ultimately proves him right or if the high-profile talent proves its worth instead.

TOGETHER WITH AUGMENT CODE

The Rundown: Augment Code’s new adoption playbook, AI-Powered Engineering at Scale, offers exclusive insights and tools to help you accelerate your AI adoption process and scale across the enterprise.

In Augment Code’s guide, you’ll explore:

  • real frameworks from CTOs who’ve scaled AI

  • ready-to-use checklists for AI transformation

  • organizational self-assessment tools

Stop experimenting and start scaling. Download the playbook today.

ELEVENLABS

Image source: ElevenLabs

The Rundown: ElevenLabs just debuted its Iconic Voice Marketplace, connecting brands with AI-replicated celebrity voices through rights-holder agreements, featuring 28 licensed options spanning actors, historical figures, athletes, and more.

The details:

  • The platform brokers licensing deals between companies and estates or living celebrities, with ElevenLabs synthesizing the approved voice content.

  • Living celebrities available on the platform include actor Michael Caine, joining actress Liza Minnelli and musicians Art Garfunkel and Michael Feinstein.

  • Deceased figures like Maya Angelou, Babe Ruth, Alan Turing, and Mark Twain were recreated from archived recordings via estate partnerships.

  • The company also announced that actor Matthew McConaughey (an investor in ElevenLabs) is using the tech to voice his newsletter for Spanish readers.

Why it matters: A ‘Cameo’ platform for AI voices (and eventually full likenesses) has felt like an inevitability — and while most of the library is historical, it’s a first step into a weird world of ‘cloned’ IP. With AI image/video apps (looking at you, Sora) muddying the waters, ElevenLabs could offer an ethical option for both brands and celebrities.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use ChatGPT's Study and Learn mode to get tutoring-style guidance that breaks problems into steps, checks your reasoning, and adapts to your level instead of just giving you answers.

Step-by-step:

  1. In ChatGPT, click the "+" icon on the chat composer, select "More," then activate "Study and learn" mode

  2. Describe your learning goal (e.g., "Teach me how to program in Python" or "Help me solve this finance problem")

  3. Answer context questions the AI asks, then follow the step-by-step guidance as it nudges you toward solutions rather than providing direct answers

  4. Use for comprehensive understanding and problem-solving skills; switch to Regular mode for quick facts or content generation

Pro tip: For creating study guides and quick quizzes, you can also try NotebookLM.

PRESENTED BY IBM

The Rundown: IBM Network Intelligence introduces a new human-AI model that blends analytical AI with “reasoning” AI — a dual approach developed to help enterprises filter noise, identify issues, and scale operations seamlessly.

With IBM Network Intelligence, you’ll experience:

  • Fast, accurate insights

  • AI that scales while humans guide strategy

  • Less tool bloat, more efficiency

SOFTBANK, NVIDIA, & OPENAI

Image source: Bloomberg @ Tokyo AI Summit — Jensen Huang with Masayoshi Son

The Rundown: SoftBank Group sold its complete $5.8B Nvidia position to finance a wave of AI infrastructure investments with OpenAI, with CEO Masayoshi Son declaring the company "all in" on the AI leader despite growing questions about AI capital returns.

The details:

  • The Nvidia sale marks SoftBank's second complete exit from the chipmaker, after selling a $4B stake in 2019 for shares now valued above $150B.

  • Son revealed that pre-2019, CEO Sam Altman asked him to invest $10B, but Microsoft ultimately won the deal and became the exclusive computing partner.

  • The CEO believes "OpenAI will be listed eventually… and will become the most valuable company in the world," driving SoftBank's $33.2B planned investment.

  • Son’s concentrated approach has produced both big wins (like Alibaba's $20M investment to $150B) and catastrophic losses, including $11.5B on WeWork.

Why it matters: Masayoshi Son is no stranger to making massive generational investments, and this time he’s putting his chips on the AI leader — and pulling them off of the AI chipmaking king. But OAI will still be buying Nvidia’s chips to power its massive compute needs, so the circular AI ball of money continues to grow regardless.

QUICK HITS

  • 🧠 ScreenPlay – Smart agents that think, adapt, and automate anything your old bots couldn’t handle*

  • 💬 Scribe v2 Realtime - ElevenLabs’ 150ms latency speech transcription AI

  • 🤖 Kimi K2 Thinking - Moonshot AI’s open-source thinking agent

  • 🗣️ Meta Omnilingual ASR - Automatic speech recognition for 1,600 languages

*Sponsored Listing

OpenAI lost a Munich copyright case, with the court ruling ChatGPT illegally trained on songs and the German music rights society calling it Europe’s “first landmark AI ruling”.

ElevenLabs launched Scribe v2 Realtime, a transcription model that tops accuracy benchmarks and allows live agents to utilize real-time understanding in 90 languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation posted a new blog calling out Wikipedia’s importance as a source for AI training, pushing AI developers for “attribution and financial support”.

Samsung unveiled its Vision AI Companion across its 2025 TV lineup, integrating an upgraded Bixby assistant with Copilot and Perplexity for conversational chat, and more.

Wall Street lender Blue Owl Capital is investing $3B into a New Mexico data center for OpenAI’s Stargate, with banks set to fund an additional $18B for the 4.5GW facility.

Google introduced Private AI Compute, a cloud-based AI processing platform that uses Gemini models with hardware-secured isolation to keep user data private.

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 Jeff L. in San Francisco, CA:

"I created a Gemini Gem called "AIML Tutor" to help me get up to speed in AI/ML. It is instructed to provide answers at a beginner level and increase in complexity as I prove to have grasped concepts. I asked it to use metaphors since I've found that's the best way for concepts to stick with me. I use it all day to explain concepts and have also used it to create learning plans with links to external materials like YouTube videos."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

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

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