Yann LeCun

French computer scientist, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, NYU professor — pioneer of convolutional neural networks (CNN), 2018 Turing Award winner, and a vocal advocate for open-source AI.

Yann LeCun is one of the three "godfathers of deep learning" alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Born in France in 1960, he developed the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture in the late 1980s — first applied to handwriting recognition and later the foundation of modern computer vision. He's been Chief AI Scientist at Meta since 2013 and a professor at NYU. He matters because Meta's open-source-friendly AI strategy traces partly to him. As Chief AI Scientist, LeCun has championed open weights and open research; the Llama open-source model line is consistent with his philosophy. He's also one of the most-followed AI researchers on social media (X / Twitter), regularly debating publicly about model capabilities and AI risk. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio for foundational work on deep learning. His current research focuses on "world models" and energy-based models — alternatives to current LLMs that he argues will be needed to reach truly intelligent systems. Unlike Hinton, LeCun is publicly skeptical of "existential AI risk" arguments. He has frequently said current LLMs are not on a path to AGI, that worry about superintelligence is misplaced, and that open-source AI is safer than closed. The disagreement with Hinton is one of the most-watched debates in the field. Related: CNN, Meta AI, deep learning, Llama family, Hinton.