Meta's FAIR chief Joelle Pineau announces departure
Meta said it had no immediate replacement lined up; AI research had already been reorganised to report to chief product officer Chris Cox rather than to Pineau's role.
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Joelle Pineau announced on Facebook that she would leave Meta, where she had led the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division for more than two years, with her last day set for May 2025. She said she planned to take time off before starting a “new adventure.”
A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg News the company had no immediate successor lined up and was searching for one. The departure came after Meta had already reorganised its AI structure so that research reported up through chief product officer Chris Cox rather than through a dedicated research leadership track — a shift that reduced FAIR’s standing relative to the product-facing Llama teams. It also landed amid a sharp increase in AI spending: Meta had said it planned to spend some $65 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025.
Pineau had been a prominent voice for Meta’s open-research posture, including its publication of Llama model weights and papers, at a time when other frontier labs were disclosing progressively less about their models. Her exit fed a wider narrative, echoed elsewhere in 2025, of senior research leadership turnover at Meta as the company reoriented AI research toward product delivery and, later in the year, toward newly recruited “superintelligence” hires from rival labs.