# Meta FAIR

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/meta_fair
> Updated: 2026-06-25
> Categories: AI Research, Meta AI, Research Organizations
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

**Meta FAIR** (Fundamental AI Research), originally **Facebook AI Research**, is the open, fundamental research laboratory of [Meta](/wiki/meta), founded in December 2013 with [Yann LeCun](/wiki/yann_lecun) as its first director.[1][4] It is known for open, publishable research and for releasing widely used software, models, and datasets, including the [PyTorch](/wiki/pytorch) deep learning framework, the [LLaMA](/wiki/llama) language models, and Segment Anything (SAM). Since mid-2025, FAIR sits inside the reorganized [Meta Superintelligence Labs](/wiki/meta_superintelligence_labs) (MSL), distinct from Meta's product-focused generative AI teams.[2][3]

FAIR's stated mission is to advance "the state of the art in artificial intelligence through open research for the benefit of all."[1] Over more than a decade it has been a leading source of openly published AI breakthroughs in computer vision, speech, natural language processing, and self-supervised learning, releasing papers, code, datasets, and open-weight models rather than shipping consumer features.[1][2]

## What is Meta FAIR?

FAIR is Meta's long-horizon, science-driven AI lab, separate from the applied and generative AI groups that build consumer products. Its purpose is fundamental rather than product research: investigating the science of machine intelligence (computer vision, speech, natural language processing, reasoning, and self-supervised learning) and sharing the results openly. Many of its outputs, including PyTorch and the early LLaMA models, became standard tools across the wider field. The lab has historically measured itself by published research and adopted open-source releases, which set it apart from industrial labs that kept more of their work proprietary.[1][2]

## When was FAIR founded and who led it?

Facebook announced the lab on December 9, 2013, naming LeCun, then a professor at New York University and one of the principal figures in deep learning, as its leader.[4][5] LeCun joined at the personal invitation of Mark Zuckerberg, and the lab was set up alongside Facebook's existing applied machine learning work as a dedicated home for long-horizon research.[1][6] LeCun became the first director of the research group, with the New York lab located about a block from NYU's campus in Manhattan; he stepped down from his directorship of NYU's Center for Data Science in early 2014.[5][7]

From the start the group was organized around a public, open-science model. In practice this has meant publishing papers, releasing code and datasets, and open-sourcing models, which set FAIR apart from some industrial labs that kept more of their work proprietary.[1][4]

Note that FAIR dates to 2013, not 1993; LeCun's earlier deep learning work, including convolutional networks for handwriting recognition at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s and 1990s, predates the lab and was done elsewhere.[7]

## Where are FAIR's labs located?

FAIR began across three sites: Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters in California, its London office, and the new lab in New York City.[4][5] It opened a Paris lab in 2015, its first in Europe, and later added sites in Montreal, Tel Aviv, Seattle, and Pittsburgh.[8][9] As of 2025, Meta lists AI research locations in Menlo Park, New York City, London, Paris, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Seattle, and Pittsburgh.[2]

## What has FAIR built?

FAIR has produced a long line of widely cited models, datasets, and tools. The table below lists representative outputs.

| Year | Output | Area |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 2015 | Faster R-CNN | Object detection |
| 2017 | [PyTorch](/wiki/pytorch) | Deep learning framework |
| 2017 | Mask R-CNN | Instance segmentation |
| 2018 | Detectron | Object detection platform |
| 2018 | fastMRI (with NYU) | Medical imaging dataset |
| 2019 | RoBERTa | Pretrained language model |
| 2019 | BART | Sequence-to-sequence pretraining |
| 2019 | wav2vec | Self-supervised speech |
| 2019 | Detectron2 | Object detection library |
| 2020 | wav2vec 2.0 | Self-supervised speech |
| 2021 | DINO | Self-supervised vision |
| 2022 | OPT (Open Pre-trained Transformer) | Open language model |
| 2022 | No Language Left Behind (NLLB) | Machine translation |
| 2023 | [LLaMA](/wiki/llama) | Open language model |
| 2023 | Segment Anything (SAM) | Promptable image segmentation |
| 2023 | DINOv2 | Self-supervised vision features |
| 2023 | SeamlessM4T | Multilingual speech and text translation |

PyTorch, released in 2017, became one of the most widely used machine learning frameworks and was later moved to an independent foundation.[2] In computer vision, FAIR's object-detection work (Faster R-CNN and Mask R-CNN) and its Detectron and Detectron2 code libraries were broadly adopted, as were the self-supervised DINO and DINOv2 image models and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for promptable segmentation.[1][10] In language, RoBERTa and BART were influential pretrained models, and OPT was an early open large language model released with its training logbook.[2] In speech, the wav2vec family advanced self-supervised speech recognition, and the translation efforts No Language Left Behind and SeamlessM4T extended coverage to large numbers of languages.[1] The first LLaMA models were released in February 2023 as research artifacts; later, consumer-facing Llama releases (including Llama 4) came primarily from Meta's separate generative AI organization rather than from FAIR.[11]

## Who has led FAIR over time?

LeCun led FAIR as director from 2013. In January 2018 Meta restructured its AI work: LeCun moved to the role of Chief AI Scientist, a more research-focused position, and Jerome Pesenti joined as Vice President of AI, overseeing both the research lab and the applied machine learning group.[12][13] LeCun has said he wanted to step back from the administrative load of running the lab so he could focus on research.[13]

Joelle Pineau, a McGill University professor and reinforcement learning researcher, led FAIR for several years and became the Vice President of AI Research who ran the group day to day.[14][15] On April 1, 2025, Pineau announced she would leave Meta; her last day was May 30, 2025, after roughly eight years at the company.[14][15] In August 2025 she joined the AI company Cohere as Chief AI Officer.[16]

On May 8, 2025, Meta named Robert Fergus, a computer vision researcher who had spent about five years as a research director at Google DeepMind and who had helped found FAIR alongside LeCun, to lead the lab.[17][18]

## How did Meta reorganize its AI research in 2025?

FAIR's place inside Meta shifted several times. In June 2022 Meta decentralized parts of its AI organization and moved FAIR into the Reality Labs Research division.[19] Through 2023 and 2024, as Meta pushed into generative AI products, reporting noted that FAIR's profile inside the company had narrowed, with the high-profile Llama product releases coming from a separate generative AI team rather than from the research lab.[15]

The largest shake-up came in mid-2025. In June 2025 Meta agreed to invest $14.3 billion for a 49 percent non-voting stake in the data-labeling company Scale AI, a deal that valued Scale at roughly $29 billion and brought in its 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang.[24] On June 30, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced in an internal memo that Meta would house its AI work under a new group, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), with Wang as Chief AI Officer and former GitHub chief executive Nat Friedman leading AI products.[3][20] "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote. "I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way."[25]

On August 19, 2025, MSL was organized into four groups: TBD Lab, a research unit focused on the Llama models and led by Wang; FAIR, the fundamental research lab, led by Fergus; a Products and Applied Research team led by Friedman; and an infrastructure team, MSL Infra, led by engineering vice president Aparna Ramani.[3] In October 2025 Meta cut roughly 600 roles across MSL, affecting FAIR, product AI, and infrastructure units while sparing the elite TBD Lab group.[3][21] Wang told staff the goal was to remove "organizational bloat" so that "each person will have more scope and impact."[26]

## Why did Yann LeCun leave Meta?

On November 19, 2025, LeCun confirmed he would leave Meta after about 12 years to start his own company focused on world-model architectures, systems intended to learn the structure and dynamics of the physical world rather than predict text.[22][23] He has publicly argued that large language models are a "dead end" on the path to higher machine intelligence and that world models will dominate within a few years. Asked about reporting to Wang under the new structure, LeCun told the Financial Times: "You don't tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do."[27] His venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, co-founded with Alexandre LeBrun and headquartered in Paris, later raised about $1.03 billion in a seed round announced in March 2026 at a reported $3.5 billion pre-money valuation.[28][29]

As of early 2026, FAIR continues as the fundamental research group within Meta Superintelligence Labs under Fergus, separate from the product-focused TBD Lab and applied teams.[3]

## See also

- [Meta](/wiki/meta)
- [Meta AI](/wiki/meta_ai)
- [Meta Superintelligence Labs](/wiki/meta_superintelligence_labs)
- [Yann LeCun](/wiki/yann_lecun)
- [Joelle Pineau](/wiki/joelle_pineau)
- [PyTorch](/wiki/pytorch)
- [LLaMA](/wiki/llama)

## References

[1] AI at Meta, "Ten years of FAIR: Advancing the state-of-the-art through open research." https://ai.meta.com/blog/fair-10-year-anniversary-open-science-meta/

[2] Wikipedia, "Meta AI." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_AI

[3] Wikipedia, "Meta Superintelligence Labs." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Superintelligence_Labs

[4] NYU, "Courant's LeCun to Lead Facebook's New Artificial Intelligence Group" (December 2013). https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2013/december/courants-lecun-to-lead-facebooks-new-artificial-intelligence-group-.html

[5] TechCrunch, "NYU 'Deep Learning' Professor LeCun Will Head Facebook's New Artificial Intelligence Lab" (December 9, 2013). https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/09/facebook-artificial-intelligence-lab-lecun/

[6] CNBC, "Meet the man who makes Facebook's machines think" (April 17, 2017). https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/17/meet-the-man-who-makes-facebooks-machines-think.html

[7] Wikipedia, "Yann LeCun." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yann_LeCun

[8] CNBC, "Why Facebook chose to open its first European A.I. lab in Paris and not London" (June 23, 2020). https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/facebook-fair-paris-london.html

[9] GeekWire, "FAIR competition? Facebook raises status of AI research labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh" (2018). https://www.geekwire.com/2018/fair-competition-facebook-raises-status-ai-research-labs-seattle-pittsburgh/

[10] GitHub, "facebookresearch/Detectron." https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron

[11] Fortune, "Meta's AI research lab is 'dying a slow death,' some insiders say" (April 10, 2025). https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/meta-ai-research-lab-fair-questions-departures-future-yann-lecun-new-beginning/

[12] TechCrunch, "Facebook appoints a new AI research head" (January 23, 2018). https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/23/facebook-appoints-a-new-ai-research-head/

[13] CNBC, "Facebook hires Jerome Pesenti as new VP of AI" (January 23, 2018). https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/facebook-hires-jerome-pesenti-as-new-vp-of-ai.html

[14] CNBC, "Meta's head of AI research announces departure" (April 1, 2025). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/01/metas-head-of-ai-research-announces-departure.html

[15] TechCrunch, "Meta's head of AI research plans to leave the company" (April 1, 2025). https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/01/metas-head-of-ai-research-plans-to-leave-the-company/

[16] TechCrunch, "Cohere hires long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer" (August 14, 2025). https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/14/cohere-hires-long-time-meta-research-head-joelle-pineau-as-its-chief-ai-officer/

[17] TechCrunch, "Meta taps former Google DeepMind director to lead its AI research lab" (May 8, 2025). https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/meta-taps-former-google-deepmind-director-to-lead-its-ai-research-lab/

[18] The AI Insider, "Meta Appoints Former DeepMind Research Director Robert Fergus to Lead FAIR Lab" (May 12, 2025). https://theaiinsider.tech/2025/05/12/meta-appoints-former-deepmind-research-director-robert-fergus-to-lead-fair-lab/

[19] Axios, "Meta reorganization aims to decentralize Facebook's AI efforts" (June 2, 2022). https://www.axios.com/2022/06/02/meta-facebook-ai-decentralize

[20] Built In, "Meta Superintelligence Labs: What We Know So Far." https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-superintelligence-labs

[21] Axios, "Meta's Alexandr Wang reorgs superintelligence lab" (October 22, 2025). https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/meta-superintelligence-tbd-ai-reorg

[22] South China Morning Post, "Yann LeCun leaving Meta to launch AI start-up focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence." https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3333470/yann-lecun-leaving-meta-launch-ai-start-focused-advanced-machine-intelligence

[23] 36Kr, "Yann LeCun Officially Announces Departure to Start Business Targeting Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI)." https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3560775478148231

[24] CNBC, "Scale AI's Alexandr Wang confirms departure for Meta as part of $14.3 billion deal" (June 12, 2025). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/12/scale-ai-founder-wang-announces-exit-for-meta-part-of-14-billion-deal.html

[25] CNBC, "Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo" (June 30, 2025). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/30/mark-zuckerberg-creating-meta-superintelligence-labs-read-the-memo.html

[26] CNBC, "Meta lays off 600 from 'bloated' AI unit as Wang cements leadership" (October 22, 2025). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/meta-layoffs-ai.html

[27] The Decoder, "'You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do' says LeCun as he exits Meta for his own startup" (2025). https://the-decoder.com/you-certainly-dont-tell-a-researcher-like-me-what-to-do-says-lecun-as-he-exits-meta-for-his-own-startup/

[28] CNBC, "Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is leaving to create his own startup" (November 19, 2025). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/19/meta-chief-ai-scientist-yann-lecun-is-leaving-the-company-.html

[29] Fortune, "Yann LeCun is targeting a $3.5 billion valuation for his new startup that hasn't even launched yet" (December 19, 2025). https://fortune.com/2025/12/19/yann-lecun-ami-labs-ai-startup-valuation-meta-departure/