In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a deal that valued the data-labeling startup at $29 billion and brought in Scale AI's 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, to lead Meta's new Superintelligence Labs. A year later, Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun told the Financial Times that Wang was "young" and "inexperienced," adding that Wang had "no experience with research or how you practice research, how you do it." LeCun, who made his own abrupt exit from Meta in November 2025 after being placed under Wang, dismissed the technical direction as "completely LLM-pilled," arguing large language models are "a dead end when it comes to superintelligence." He predicted "a lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave." Joelle Pineau, vice president of Meta's AI research group, announced her departure, and three high-profile researchers — Avi Verma, Ethan Knight, and Rishabh Agarwal — left within months of joining. In the weeks following the Superintelligence Labs announcement, at least eight researchers, engineers, and product leaders departed. Meta has described the turnover as normal and pushed back on reports that Zuckerberg sidelined Wang. Leaked internal audio from an April 2026 town hall captured Zuckerberg defending a program called the Model Capability