Joelle Pineau, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Research at Meta Platforms, announced on LinkedIn her planned departure after nearly eight years. “After nearly 8 years at Meta, time has come to say farewell. This has been the professional experience of a lifetime!” said Pineau, according to her LinkedIn post. In a farewell note posted on social media, she remarked, “Today, as the world undergoes significant change, 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,” and noted that her last day would be May 30. She added that she would take time to observe and reflect before embarking on a new adventure and that she would be cheering from the sidelines.
Her departure came shortly before Meta’s first LlamaCon AI conference on April 29, which was set to feature the newest version of the company’s open‐source large language model Llama 4. The announcement coincided with industry changes as Meta increased its investment in AI infrastructure, with plans to spend up to $65 billion in 2025. Competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI intensified efforts to capture market share.
Pineau joined Meta in May 2017 with the goal of “solving AI and open‐sourcing our research to accelerate innovation through the broader ecosystem” and became a proponent of responsible AI development. She oversaw the company’s Fundamental AI Research lab from early 2023 and led a team that grew to nearly 1,000 researchers across ten locations. Under her leadership, the lab advanced projects in voice translation and image‐recognition technology and developed open‐source tools such as PyTorch, FAISS, RoBERTa, DINO, Llama, SAM, CodeGen, and AudioBox.
Meta restructured its AI teams last year to unify its research portfolio and speed the integration of AI into its products and services. With CEO Mark Zuckerberg declaring AI as the company’s top priority, Pineau’s departure created a vacancy as Meta pursued new opportunities, including plans to extend its AI assistant across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. A Meta spokesperson noted that while the search for Pineau’s successor was underway, the company remained committed to its AI strategy.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.