Yann LeCun
American-French computer scientist (born 1960)
Yann André Le Cun ( lə-KUN; French: [ləkœ̃]; usually spelled LeCun; 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. He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU). He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before co-founding Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in December 2025.
LeCun completed a computer science PhD at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1987, and was briefly a postdoctoral researcher under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. From 1988, LeCun led the development of the LeNet convolutional neural networks for optical character recognition at Bell Labs. He is one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology, alongside Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner. In 2003, LeCun joined NYU, where he worked on energy-based models, computer vision, and DARPA autonomous navigation projects.
In 2013, LeCun joined Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research. In 2018, LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for their work on deep learning. LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton, and occasionally Jürgen Schmidhuber, are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Yann LeCun” as american-French computer scientist (born 1960). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american-French computer scientist (born 1960). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3571662. VIAF identifies the subject as 46841749. The Library of Congress control number is no2002032333. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2025, 1987 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yann LeCun” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.