"and we didn't see anything" is not justified at all.

Meta absolutely has (or at least had) a word class industry AI lab and has published a ton of great work and open source models (granted their LLM open source stuff failed to keep up with chinese models in 2024/2025 ; their other open source stuff for thins like segmentation don't get enough credit though). Yann's main role was Chief AI Scientist, not any sort of product role, and as far as I can tell he did a great job building up and leading a research group within Meta.

He deserved a lot of credit for pushing Meta to very open to publishing research and open sourcing models trained on large scale data.

Just as one example, Meta (together with NYU) just published "Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03276) which has a ton of large-experiment backed insights.

Yann did seem to end up with a bit of an inflated ego, but I still consider him a great research lead. Context: I did a PhD focused on AI, and Meta's group had a similar pedigree as Google AI/Deepmind as far as places to go do an internship or go to after graduation.

I wasn't criticising his scientific contribution at all, that's why I started my comment by appraising what he did.

Creating a startup has to be about a product. When you raise 1B, investors are expecting returns, not papers.