Yann LeCun

Artificial Intelligence Pioneer

Yann LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Professor of Data Science, Computer Science, Neural Science, and Electrical Engineering at New York University. Regarded as one of “the three godfathers of AI,” LeCun did pioneering work in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and computational neuroscience. Starting with his PhD research in the 1980s at the Sorbonne in Paris and continuing into the 1990s at Bell Labs and AT&T in New Jersey, LeCun developed neural-network techniques that enabled machines to better recognize handwritten and printed text; an early application was automatic check scanning, which transformed banking. A recipient of the Turing Prize, the “Nobel Prize of computer science,” LeCun says that his interest in machine intelligence dates back to his childhood fascination with HAL, the murderous mainframe in 2001: A Space Odyssey. To protect people from rogue AIs in the future, LeCun says we must build into current AIs the notion of empathy and "submission to humans.”