(Reuters) -Yann LeCun, one of the founding figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at Meta Platforms, said on Wednesday he plans to leave the company at the end of the year to launch a new AI startup.
LeCun has been a key part of Meta’s artificial intelligence ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders.
Over 12 years, he served five as FAIR’s founding director and seven as the company’s chief AI scientist, guiding breakthroughs in deep learning, computer vision and large-scale language modeling that underpin products like Instagram recommendations and Meta’s generative AI systems.
He developed an early form of an artificial neural network that mimicked how the human eye and brain process images — technology that later became the backbone of modern image recognition and GenAI.
LeCun, 65, said his new venture will pursue Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) research — a project he has developed in collaboration with colleagues at FAIR and New York University, where he teaches.
The computer scientist said he will provide more details on his new firm at a later date, but added that Meta will be a partner in the venture, reflecting what he called the company’s “continued interest and support” for AMI’s long-term goals.
“The creation of FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment,” he wrote. “The impact of FAIR on Meta, the AI field, and the wider world has been spectacular.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth have both credited LeCun with laying the foundations for Meta’s current AI infrastructure, including its open-source Llama models that have become a cornerstone of the global AI research community.
LeCun is widely regarded as one of the “godfathers” of deep learning, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — a trio that won the 2018 Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)
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