Yann LeCun

Yann Andre Le Cun is a French-American computer scientist, the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at New York University Courant Institute, known for his work on convolutional neural networks and their application to optical character recognition and computer vision, techniques that became central to modern deep learning. LeCun served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms from 2013, leading its Fundamental AI Research group, before departing to co-found Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in December 2025, an organization focused on world-model architectures and research toward more general machine intelligence. He also co-created the DjVu image compression format and, with Leon Bottou, co-developed the Lush programming language for machine learning research. LeCun shared the ACM Turing Award in 2018 with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on deep learning, and the three are often called the Godfathers of AI; he was elevated to Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 2023 and received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2025.