Yann LeCun
AI researcher; founder, AMI Labs
Deep learning researcher who left Meta in 2026 to found AMI Labs, pursuing an alternative to today's large language models.
Key arguments & positions
- Argues large language models are fundamentally limited and cannot reach human-level intelligence; advocates "world models" that learn by predicting the physical world instead.
- A prominent public skeptic of near-term AGI and "AI doom" narratives.
- Champions open-source AI research.
Accomplishments
- Co-invented convolutional neural networks.
- Shared the 2018 ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.
- Led Meta's AI research organization (FAIR) as Chief AI Scientist for over a decade.
- Founded AMI Labs (2026) after leaving Meta, raising roughly $1 billion in seed funding for "world model" research.
Papers & key writings
- "A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence" (2022)
- Foundational CNN and backpropagation papers (1989–1998)
Links
Jobs
What they've said in public about careers, hiring and work. Each point links to its source.
- Career advice
Advises students to "learn things that have a long shelf life" — mathematics, physics, engineering, signal processing, control theory — rather than trendy topics. "If you had a choice between mobile app programming and quantum mechanics, take quantum mechanics."
LinkedIn post (LeCun's advice for the AI age), April 2026 - Public position
Argues that AI isn't replacing workers but making them managers: "Even at a junior level, you'll probably be managing a team of AI agents. But you still need to understand what they're doing." He also says "don't listen to CEOs" about AI job impact because they have a vested interest in hyping the products they sell.
LinkedIn post (LeCun's advice for the AI age), April 2026
Timeline
- 1989Applies convolutional networks to handwritten digit recognition at Bell Labs.
- 2013Founds Facebook AI Research and becomes its director.
- 2015Co-writes the Nature review "Deep Learning" with Bengio and Hinton.
- 2018Shares the Turing Award with Bengio and Hinton.
- 2022Publishes "A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence".
In the library
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