NEW YORK (AP) — Artificial intelligence pioneer Yann LeCun said Wednesday he will be leaving his job as Meta's chief AI scientist at the end of the year.

LeCun said he will be forming a startup company to pursue research on advanced forms of AI that can “understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.”

His announcement, after more than a week of rumors, comes after Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, began cutting roughly 600 AI jobs this fall.

LeCun said in a social media post that Meta will partner with the new startup and that some of the research will overlap with Meta's commercial interests and some of it will not.

LeCun joined Facebook in 2013 and co-founded Meta’s AI research division, formerly known as Facebook AI Research. LeCun stepped down as the group’s director in 2018 but has remained Meta’s chief AI scientist.

He's also a part-time professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003.

LeCun spent his early career at the image processing department at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on developing AI systems that could “read” text found in digitized images. He was a winner in 2019 of computer science's top prize, the Turing Award, along with fellow AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.