Yann LeCun
Chief AI Scientist, Meta
Biography
Yann André Le Cun is a French-American computer scientist working in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, robotics and image compression. He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before co-founding Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in December 2025.
Career Timeline
Yann André Le Cun was born on 8 July 1960 at Soisy-sous-Montmorency, in the suburbs of Paris.
In 1988, LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D.
After a brief tenure as a fellow of NEC Research Institute, LeCun joined New York University in 2003, where he is Jacob T.
In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science.
In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website.
In 2014, he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and in 2015, the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.
In 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their work on deep learning.
In 2019, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Key Achievements
- Invented Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for image recognition
- Won the 2018 Turing Award for breakthroughs in deep learning
- Pioneered Self-Supervised Learning research at Meta AI
Notable Quotes
""The analogy I've been using is the fact that perhaps an equivalent event in the history of humanity to what might be provided by Generalization of AI assistant is the invention of the printing press. It made everybody smarter.""
""#416 - Yann Lecun: Meta AI, Open Source, Limits of LLMs, AGI & the Future of AI", on Lex Fridman Podcast, found on DeepCast (7 March 2024)"
""AI is going to bring a new renaissance for humanity, a new form of enlightenment, if you want, because AI is going to amplify everybody's intelligence.""