Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is a computer scientist born in France in 1960. He received an electrical engineering diploma from ESIEE in France and, in 1987, a PhD in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie. After postdoctoral research in Hinton's group at the University of Toronto in Canada, he moved to the United States in 1988 to join AT&T Bell Labs. He worked as a professor at New York University (NYU) from 2003, and at Facebook (now Meta) from late 2013 to the end of 2025. As of October 2026, he is executive chairman of AMI Labs, an AI company headquartered in Paris, France, and a professor at NYU.

LeCun developed the convolutional neural network (a network that sweeps a small filter across a whole picture to find the same pattern wherever it appears). At Bell Labs he researched ways to recognise printed and handwritten text, and he helped to build a cheque-reading system that was put into real use in the 1990s. From 1996 he led the image processing research department at AT&T Labs, where he and his colleagues created an image compression technology called DjVu. More recently he has focused on 'world models', which aim to let AI learn about the real world and predict the results of actions.

In December 2013 LeCun set up Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and led it until 2018, after which he worked as vice president and chief AI scientist. He was also the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. When he announced in November 2025 that he would leave Meta, he said he would research AI that can understand the physical world, have persistent memory, reason and plan complex sequences of actions. At the end of that year he co-founded AMI Labs to research world models, and in March 2026 the company raised about 1.03 billion US dollars. In 2019 he received the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio. At a press briefing in Seoul in October 2026, he said that the scenario of AI suddenly taking over the world is 'closer to science fiction'.