Yann LeCun
Yann LeCun is a French-born computer scientist, one of the recipients of the 2018 Turing Award, a pioneer of convolutional neural networks and applied backpropagation, and a professor at New York University. He joined Facebook (now Meta) in December 2013, where he founded and led Meta AI Research (FAIR) and served as VP and Chief AI Scientist; in November 2025 he confirmed that he was leaving Meta to found a company focused on world-model architectures.
Background and notable work
- Academic background: he received an engineering degree from ESIEE Paris in 1983 and a PhD in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now part of Sorbonne University) in 1987, where he proposed an early form of backpropagation; he then did a postdoc with Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.
- Bell Labs: he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1988, where he developed LeNet, a convolutional neural network for handwritten character recognition, and proposed the “Optimal Brain Damage” regularization method and Graph Transformer Networks; in 1996 he moved to AT&T Labs-Research and worked on the DjVu image compression format. His 1989 paper “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition” is a landmark early application of backpropagation to neural networks.
- New York University: he joined NYU in 2003 and holds a chaired professorship in computer science and neural science at the Courant Institute; in 2012 he founded the NYU Center for Data Science and served as its founding director.
- Meta: on December 9, 2013, he became the first director of Meta AI Research (FAIR), later serving as VP and Chief AI Scientist. In 2018 he shared the ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their contributions to deep learning (announced in March 2019); the three are often called the “godfathers of deep learning”.
- Leaving Meta and a startup: on November 19, 2025, he confirmed that he was leaving Meta after more than a decade to found a company focused on world-model architectures; in December 2025 he co-founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) as Executive Chair, with Alex LeBrun as CEO. Per his Wikipedia entry, in March 2026 AMI announced it had raised 1.03 billion dollars at a 3.5 billion dollar pre-money valuation.
- Other honors: the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2025, shared with Bengio, Hinton and others.
Mentioned in the show
Yann LeCun does not appear in the episodes quoted on this page; the following is a host’s comment. In Weekly #004, in the chapter on open ecosystems, resources and business closed loops (Chinese transcript), Guizang comments on Meta’s heavy spending and Zuckerberg’s push, saying “your Turing Award winner Yang Likun—if you object, then just leave” (see that line). The comment aligns with the reported direction of his November 2025 departure from Meta, but it is the host’s commentary on current events, not a statement by LeCun in the show.
Frequently asked questions
Is Yann LeCun Chinese?
No. “Yang Likun” (杨立昆) is the common Chinese rendering of his name; he is a French-born computer scientist.
Why did Yann LeCun win the Turing Award?
In 2018 he shared the ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning. LeNet, the convolutional neural network he developed in the late 1980s, was widely used for handwriting recognition and is a representative work of that direction.
What did Yann LeCun do at Meta?
He joined Facebook (now Meta) in December 2013, founded and led Meta AI Research (FAIR), and served as VP and Chief AI Scientist; he confirmed his departure in November 2025.
What are the “world models” Yann LeCun advocates?
World models are a direction he has long argued for: systems that learn by predicting how the world behaves, rather than relying only on language data. AMI Labs, which he founded in late 2025, focuses on world-model architectures. (Editorial addition, based on his Wikipedia entry.)