Biography:Yann LeCun

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Yann LeCun
LeCun in 2024
Born (1960-07-08) 8 July 1960 (age 65)
Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France
Citizenship
Education
  • ESIEE Paris (DipIng)
  • Pierre and Marie Curie University (PhD)
Known forDeep learning
Awards
  • Turing Award (2018)
  • AAAI Fellow (2019)
  • Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2021)
  • Legion of Honour (2023)
  • VinFuture Prize (2024)
  • Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2025)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisModeles connexionnistes de l'apprentissage (connectionist learning models) (1987)
Doctoral advisorMaurice Milgram[citation needed]
Website{{{1}}}

Yann André Le Cun[2] (/ləˈkʌn/ lə-KUN; fr;[3] usually spelled LeCun;[3] born 8 July 1960) is a French–American computer scientist working in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, robotics and image compression.[1][4] He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before leaving to work on his own startup company.[5][6][7]

He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNNs).[4][8] He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology, alongside Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner. He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou.

In 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their work on deep learning.[9] The four (including Jürgen Schmidhuber ) are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning".[10][11]

Early life and education

LeCun at the University of Minnesota, 2014

LeCun was born on 8 July 1960, at Soisy-sous-Montmorency in the suburbs of Paris. His name, Le Cun, originates from the old Breton form Le Cunff, and was from the region of Guingamp in northern Brittany. "Yann" is the Breton form for "John".[3]

He received a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the ESIEE Paris in 1983 and a PhD in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne University) in 1987 during which he proposed an early form of the back-propagation learning algorithm for neural networks.[12] Before joining AT&T,[6] LeCun was a postdoctoral researcher for a year, starting in 1987, supervised by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.

LeCun has three sons, and his brother is employed by Google. He acquired American citizenship.[13].

Career and research

LeCun's career has been spent primarily at Bell Labs, New York University and Meta Platforms, Inc.

Bell Labs

In 1996, he joined AT&T Labs-Research as head of the Image Processing Research Department, which was part of Lawrence Rabiner's Speech and Image Processing Research Lab, and worked primarily on the DjVu image compression technology,[14] used by many websites, notably the Internet Archive, to distribute scanned documents. His collaborators at AT&T include Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.

New York University

After a brief tenure as a fellow of the NEC Research Institute (now NEC-Labs America) in Princeton, New Jersey, LeCun joined New York University (NYU) in 2003, where he is Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Neural Science. He is also a professor at the Tandon School of Engineering.[15][16] At NYU, he has worked primarily on energy-based models for supervised and unsupervised learning,[17] feature learning for object recognition in computer vision,[18] and mobile robotics.[19]

In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science.[20] On 9 December 2013, LeCun became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York City and in early 2014 stepped down from the NYU–CDS directorship.[21] In 2025 it was reported that LeCun was leaving Meta to launch his own start-up.[22]

In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website. He was the chair and organiser of the "Learning Workshop" held every year between 1986 and 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics[23] at UCLA. He is the co-director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) of CIFAR.[24]

In 2016, he was the visiting professor of computer science on the Chaire Annuelle Informatique et Sciences Numériques at Collège de France in Paris, where he presented the leçon inaugurale (inaugural lecture).[25] In 2023, he was named as the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute.[26] LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.[27]

Meta Platforms

LeCun joined Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2013 as chief AI scientist and led the company's AI research laboratory, FAIR. On 19 November 2025, he confirmed that he would be leaving Meta after ten years to found his own company focused on world-model architectures and human-like artificial intelligence he calls superintelligence.[7][28]

Honours and awards

LeCun is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences,[29][30] National Academy of Engineering and the French Académie des Sciences.

He has received honorary doctorates from Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City[31] in 2016, from EPFL[32] in 2018, from Université Côte d'Azur in 2021,[33] from Università di Siena in 2023,[34] and from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023.

In 2014, he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award and in 2015, the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.[35]

In 2018, LeCun was awarded the IRI Medal, established by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI),[36] and the Harold Pender Award, given by the University of Pennsylvania.[37]

In 2019, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[38]

In March 2019, LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, sharing it with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.[39]

In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research", along with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis.[40]

In 2023, the President of France made him a Chevalier (Knight) of the French Legion of Honour.[41]

During the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024 in Davos, he received the Global Swiss AI Award 2023.[42] The same year, he received the grand prize of the VinFuture Prize alongside Yoshua Bengio, Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li for their groundbreaking contributions to neural networks and deep learning algorithms.[43]

In 2025 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering jointly with Yoshua Bengio, Bill Dally, Geoffrey E. Hinton, John Hopfield, Jen-Hsun Huang and Fei-Fei Li.[44][45]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  2. ↑ "Version électronique authentifiée publiée au JO n° 0001 du 01/01/2020 | Legifrance". https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jo_pdf.do?id=JORFTEXT000039726325. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Fun Stuff". http://yann.lecun.com/ex/fun/. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1  , Wikidata Q28018765
  5. ↑ Shaban, Hamza (2019). "Artificial-intelligence pioneers win $1 million Turing Award" (in en). The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/27/artificial-intelligence-pioneers-win-turing-award/?noredirect=on. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Metz, Cade (2019). "Turing Award Won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-ai.html. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Heikkilä, Melissa (2025). "Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’". London: Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2. """I'm sure there's a lot of people at Meta who would like me to NOT tell the world that LLMs basically are a dead end when it comes to superintelligence""" 
  8. ↑ LeCun, Yann; Bottou, Léon; Bengio, Yoshua; Haffner, Patrick (1998). "Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition". Proceedings of the IEEE 86 (11): 2278–2324. doi:10.1109/5.726791. Bibcode: 1998IEEEP..86.2278L. http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-01a.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2014. 
  9. ↑ "Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award". New York. 27 March 2019. https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/march/turing-award-2018. 
  10. ↑ Anon (2019). "Nobel prize of tech awarded to 'godfathers of AI'". The Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/03/27/google-awards-1m-turing-prize-godfathers-ai/. 
  11. ↑ Kahn, Jeremy (27 March 2019). "Three 'Godfathers of Deep Learning' Selected for Turing Award". https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/three-godfathers-of-deep-learning-selected-for-turing-award. 
  12. ↑ Y. LeCun: Une procédure d'apprentissage pour réseau a seuil asymmetrique (a Learning Scheme for Asymmetric Threshold Networks), Proceedings of Cognitiva 85, 599–604, Paris, France, 1985.
  13. ↑ Guiton, Amaelle (2015-09-07). "Yann LeCun, le temps des machines" (in fr). Libération. https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2015/09/07/le-temps-des-machines_1377539/. 
  14. ↑ Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun: "High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu", Journal of Electronic Imaging, 7(3):410–425, 1998.
  15. ↑ "People – Electrical and Computer Engineering". Polytechnic Institute of New York University. http://www.poly.edu/academics/departments/electrical/people. 
  16. ↑ "Yann LeCun's Home Page". http://yann.lecun.com/. 
  17. ↑ Yann LeCun, Sumit Chopra, Raia Hadsell, Ranzato Marc'Aurelio, Fu-Jie Huang, "A Tutorial on Energy-Based Learning", in Bakir, G. and Hofman, T. and Schölkopf, B. and Smola, A. and Taskar, B. (Eds), Predicting Structured Data, MIT Press, 2006.
  18. ↑ Kevin Jarrett, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Yann LeCun, "What is the Best Multi-Stage Architecture for Object Recognition?", Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'09), IEEE, 2009
  19. ↑ Raia Hadsell, Pierre Sermanet, Marco Scoffier, Ayse Erkan, Koray Kavackuoglu, Urs Muller, Yann LeCun, "Learning Long-Range Vision for Autonomous Off-Road Driving", Journal of Field Robotics, 26(2):120–144, February 2009.
  20. ↑ "Center for Data Science – New York University". http://cds.nyu.edu. 
  21. ↑ Levy, Steven. "How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun" (in en-US). Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-meta-yann-lecun-interview/. Retrieved 2025-10-22. 
  22. ↑ Heikkilä, Melissa (2025). "Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own start-up". London: Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/c586eb77-a16e-4363-ab0b-e877898b70de. 
  23. ↑ http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/gss2012/ Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics
  24. ↑ "Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception Advisory Committee Yann LeCun". CIFAR. http://www.cifar.ca/yann-lecun. 
  25. ↑ "L'apprentissage profond : une révolution en intelligence artificielle". 28 August 2015. https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/yann-lecun/inaugural-lecture-2016-02-04-18h00.htm. Retrieved 1 March 2022. 
  26. ↑ "Yann LeCun Announced as Inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chair". CIMS. https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1441/. 
  27. ↑ Dillet, Romain (2023-11-17). "Kyutai is a French AI research lab with a $330 million budget that will make everything open source" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/kyutai-is-an-french-ai-research-lab-with-a-330-million-budget-that-will-make-everything-open-source/. 
  28. ↑ "Yann LeCun to leave Meta, launch AI startup focused on Advanced Machine Intelligence". Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/yann-lecun-leave-meta-launch-ai-startup-focused-advanced-machine-intelligence-2025-11-19/. 
  29. ↑ "News from the National Academy of Sciences". 26 April 2021. http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2021-nas-election.html. "Newly elected members and their affiliations at the time of election are: … LeCun, Yann; vice president and chief artificial intelligence scientist, Facebook; and Silver Professor of Computer Science, Data Science, Neural Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University, New York City" 
  30. ↑ "Member Directory". National Academy of Sciences. https://www.nasonline.org/directory-entry/yann-andre-lecun-hq3uqp/. 
  31. ↑ "Primera generación de Doctorados Honoris Causa en el IPN". http://www.ipn.mx/CCS/2016/Paginas/468.aspx. 
  32. ↑ Aubort, Sarah (10 August 2018). "EPFL celebrates 1,043 new Master's graduates". https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-celebrates-1043-new-master-s-graduates/. 
  33. ↑ Sanfilippo, Delphine. "YANN LECUN, DOCTEUR HONORIS CAUSA D'UNIVERSITÉ CÔTE D'AZUR". Newsroom. https://newsroom.univ-cotedazur.fr/yann-lecun-docteur-honoris-causa-duniversite-cote-dazur. 
  34. ↑ "Laurea ad honorem a Yann LeCun | Università degli Studi di Siena". https://www.unisi.it/unisilife/eventi/laurea-ad-honorem-yann-lecun. 
  35. ↑ "PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award". 2023-08-24. https://tc.computer.org/tcpami/awards/pami-distinguished-researcher-award/. 
  36. ↑ "Awards – Best Practices in Digital Innovation". https://iriweb.org/about/awards/. 
  37. ↑ "2018 Harold Pender Award and Lecture: Yann LeCun". https://events.seas.upenn.edu/distinguished-lectures/pender-lecture/. 
  38. ↑ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". American Academy of Achievement. https://achievement.org/our-history/golden-plate-awards/#science-exploration. 
  39. ↑ Metz, Cade (27 March 2019). "Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/technology/turing-award-hinton-lecun-bengio.html. 
  40. ↑ IT, Developed with webControl CMS by Intermark. "Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Demis Hassabis – Laureates – Princess of Asturias Awards". https://www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2022-geoffrey-hinton-yann-lecun-yoshua-bengio-and-demis-hassabis.html?especifica=0&idCategoria=0&anio=2022&especifica=0. 
  41. ↑ "Yann LeCun on LinkedIn: Today, I was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by President Macron… | 590 comments". https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yann-lecun_today-i-was-made-a-chevalier-de-la-l%C3%A9gion-activity-7138326352776056832-GQFp. 
  42. ↑ Yann LeCun wins the Global Swiss AI Award 2023. zhaw.ch, 18 January 2024. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
  43. ↑ "The VinFuture 2024 Grand Prize honours 5 scientists for transformational contributions to the advancement of deep learning". December 7, 2024. https://vietnamnews.vn/Society/1688552/the-vinfuture-2024-grand-prize-honours-5-scientists-for-transformational-contributions-to-the-advancement-of-deep-learning.html. 
  44. ↑ Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering 2025
  45. ↑ FT Live (2025-11-06). The Minds of Modern AI: Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun & the AI Vision of the Future. Retrieved 2025-11-09 – via YouTube.



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