In August 2022, Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats waited outside Meta AI chief Yann LeCun’s office in lower Manhattan for five long hours, skipping lunch for the chance to give the NYU professor a demo of their AI program. Once they showed him how their model could search through platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub and Twitter and surface content that GoogleGOOG -1.8% could not, such as the accounts that most frequently replied to LeCun’s tweets, he was impressed enough with the program’s accuracy