Yann LeCun
AI researcher and Turing Award laureate
Yann LeCun is a Turing Award-winning pioneer of convolutional neural networks and was Meta’s chief AI scientist for over a decade before announcing in late 2025 that he would depart to pursue a new venture focused on world models. He remains one of the most influential — and contrarian — voices on where AI architectures go next.
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LeCun developed convolutional neural networks at Bell Labs in the late 1980s and 1990s, applying them to handwriting-recognition systems that read a significant share of US bank checks. He joined NYU as a professor in 2003 and shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for foundational work on deep learning.
In 2013 he founded FAIR, Facebook’s AI research lab, and served as Meta’s chief AI scientist for more than a decade, championing the open publication culture that eventually produced the open-weight Llama models. He has long argued that autoregressive LLMs alone cannot reach human-level intelligence, advancing world-model and JEPA architectures instead.
In late 2025 LeCun announced he would leave Meta to found a startup pursuing that world-model research agenda. His departure marked the end of an era for Meta’s research organization and set up one of the most closely watched new ventures in AI.
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