Joelle Pineau speaks at the Vivatech show in Paris, France, on June 14, 2023.thibault camus/The Associated Press
The head of artificial-intelligence research at Meta Platforms Inc. META-Q, Joelle Pineau, is leaving the company at the end of May, at a time when the U.S. technology company is planning to spend billions of dollars on AI to compete with OpenAI, Google and others.
Dr. Pineau, Meta’s vice-president of AI research and a computer science professor at McGill University in Montreal, made the announcement in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday that she is leaving the company after eight years.
“As the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” she wrote, adding she will take some time off before pursuing a “new adventure.”
She did not announce a successor to her role leading the Fundamental AI Research team (FAIR) at Meta.
Dr. Pineau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We thank Joelle for leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in an e-mail, adding she “helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.”
Like other tech giants, Meta is making a huge bet on AI and plans to spend up to US$65-billion this year on the infrastructure required to build and run the technology, while hiring more talent in the field. In January, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg bragged the company was building a data centre so large it could cover much of Manhattan.
“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” he wrote on Threads.
The company is an advocate of open-source technology, and has released popular large language models (LLMs) that can be used and customized for free.
Meta reorganized its AI portfolio last year, according to The Verge, moving Dr. Pineau’s team to report to Meta’s chief product officer, instead of its chief technology officer.
The kind of fundamental research led by Dr. Pineau is crucial for making advances in the technology. In her LinkedIn post, she cited the work her team has done on Meta’s suite of Llama LLMs and other products.
Dr. Pineau joined Meta in 2017 to head up an AI research lab in Montreal while a professor at McGill and co-head of its Reasoning and Learning Lab. Her work has involved applying AI to robotics, health care and conversational agents.
She was part of a wave of Canadian AI researchers who were snapped up by large U.S. tech companies over the past decade or so, including University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, who went to Google, and University of Toronto computer science professor Sanja Fidler, who leads Nvidia Corp.’s research lab in Toronto. Raquel Urtasun, another U of T professor, worked for Uber Technologies Inc. before founding Waabi, an autonomous vehicle company.
Earlier this year, Dr. Pineau was appointed to an AI safety advisory group for Innovation, Science and Economic Development.