Meta’s chief AI scientist and one of the founding figures of modern deep learning, Yann LeCun, announced on Tuesday (local time) that he will leave the company at the end of the year to establish a new AI startup.

LeCun, a 2018 ACM Turing Award laureate, is celebrated for pioneering breakthroughs that transformed deep neural networks into a foundational component of modern computing. He shares this distinction with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, with whom he is often referred to collectively as the “godfathers of deep learning.”

His departure marks the exit of one of Meta’s most influential research leaders, and his upcoming venture adds another high-profile figure to the growing wave of top AI scientists leaving major tech firms to build independent companies.