Joelle Pineau, Vice President at Meta and head of its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) group, has announced her departure from the company after nearly eight years.

In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, Pineau cited the accelerating AI race and Meta’s evolving direction as reasons for her exit, stating that it is “time to create space for others to pursue the work.”

Expressing confidence in Meta’s AI advancements, Pineau added, “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions.” She revealed that her last day will be May 30, after which she plans to take time to “observe and reflect” before embarking on a new venture.

Pineau’s departure comes as Meta ramps up its AI investments, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg committing approximately $65 billion this year alone. Unlike competitors such as OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, which are focused on AI infrastructure, Meta is prioritizing AI-powered products like its Llama language model. Meanwhile, competition is heating up globally, with Chinese AI startup DeepSeek launching a model rivaling its Western counterparts at a fraction of the cost.

A computer science professor at McGill University, Pineau has led FAIR since early 2023, reporting to Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. Under her leadership, the team has advanced research in voice translation, image recognition, and open-source AI models like Llama. The group is also working on “advanced machine intelligence,” Meta’s vision for human-level AI.

Highlighting FAIR’s contributions, Pineau noted, “We created and nurtured dozens of projects that are now household names at Meta—PyTorch, FAISS, Roberta, Dino, Llama, SAM, Codegen, Audiobox, and more.”

Meta has yet to name a successor for Pineau but has begun the search for her replacement, according to a company spokesperson.