AI Leaders
Yann LeCun
Deep learning pioneer · Meta / NYU
France / United StatesResearcherScientistDeep LearningComputer VisionSelf-supervised Learning
Yann LeCun pioneered convolutional neural networks and backpropagation-based learning for vision, work that underpins modern computer vision. He shared the 2018 ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta, and is a professor at NYU. He is a prominent advocate of open-source AI research and of world-model / self-supervised approaches beyond autoregressive LLMs.
Education: PhD in computer science, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne)
Career timeline
- 1989LeNet / ConvNetsApplies backpropagation to handwritten digit recognition at Bell Labs.
- 2003Professor at NYUJoins NYU and later founds the NYU Center for Data Science.
- 2013Founds Facebook AI ResearchFAIR becomes one of the largest open AI research labs.
- 2018Turing AwardShared with Hinton and Bengio for deep learning.
- 2023Llama and open modelsMeta releases Llama 2 with open weights for research and commercial use.
Major achievements
- Convolutional neural networks
- Turing Award 2018
- Championed open-weight model releases at Meta
Public perspectives
Blog · 7/23/2024
Advocates open foundation models, arguing that a small number of closed providers controlling the AI layer of information is a bigger long-term risk than open weights, and that current autoregressive LLMs alone will not reach human-level intelligence.
Meta — Open Source AI Is the Path Forward