Yann LeCun
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), LeNet
- Awards
- Turing Award 2018
- Nationality
- French
Designed the convolutional networks that made computer vision possible — and had them in commercial service back in the 1990s.
At Bell Labs, LeCun developed LeNet, a network that read handwritten digits by sliding the same filter across the image rather than connecting every pixel to every node. That cut the parameter count dramatically and built in the assumption that a pattern means the same thing wherever it appears. The system read a substantial share of US bank cheques.
He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio. Since 2013 he has led Meta's AI research, and he is the one of the three who diverges most clearly on language models — arguing repeatedly that autoregressive text prediction is not enough to reach deeper understanding.