Yann LeCun
Computer scientist, Turing Award 2018 for deep learning
Born 1960
Photo: Ecole polytechnique from Paris · CC BY-SA 2.0
«Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality.»
Yann LeCun invented convolutional neural networks, the architecture behind almost all modern image recognition. His cheque-reading system was processing a significant share of American bank cheques by the late 1990s, long before deep learning became fashionable.
Key achievements
- Invented convolutional neural networks, the basis of modern vision
- Turing Award, 2018, with Hinton and Bengio
- Founded Meta's AI research lab and NYU's Center for Data Science
Universities
New York, Greenwich Village
Silver Professor at the Courant Institute since 2003, where he founded the Center for Data Science.
Toronto, Ontario
Worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Geoffrey Hinton in the late 1980s.
Facts
- He continued working on neural networks through the 1990s when most of the field had abandoned them as a dead end.
- He shared the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the three often called the godfathers of deep learning.
- He argues publicly that current large language models are not a route to human-level intelligence, a position that puts him at odds with much of his industry.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.