Facebook's AI chief Yann LeCun steps down

Head of Facebook's internal Artificial Intelligence (AI) research division, Yann LeCun, has decided to step down from the position in order to take on a dedicated research role.

IBM's chief technology officer, Jerome Pesenti will take over from LeCun, according to The Verge.

Pesenti's official role will be vice president of AI at Facebook. He will be reporting directly to Facebook CTO, Mike Schroepfer and act as an overseer of all the company's AI efforts.

Earlier, LeCun had been instrumental in developing modern approaches to AI at Facebook.

LeCun primarily developed uses of convolutional neural nets for analyzing the visual data central to computer vision techniques.