Making LeCun report to Wang was the most boneheaded move imaginable. But… I suppose Zuckerberg knows what he wants, which is AI slopware and not truly groundbreaking foundation models.
In industry research, someone in a chief position like LeCun should know how to balance long-term research with short-term projects. However, for whatever reason, he consistently shows hostility toward LLMs and engineering projects, even though Llama and PyTorch are two of the most influential projects from Meta AI. His attitude doesn’t really match what is expected from a Chief position at a product company like Facebook. When Llama 4 got criticized, he distanced himself from the project, stating that he only leads FAIR and that the project falls under a different organization. That kind of attitude doesn’t seem suitable for the face of AI at the company. It's not a surprise that Zuck tried to demote him.
This is the right take. He is obviously a pioneer and much more knowledgeable than Wang in the field, but if you don't have the product mind to serve company's business interest in short term and long term capacity anymore, you may as well stay in academia and be your own research director, let alone a chief executive in one of the largest public companies