Nov 19 (Reuters) - Yann LeCun, one of the founding

figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at

Meta Platforms ( META ), 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.