Yann André Le Cun (born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist known for foundational contributions to Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, computer vision, and image compression. He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before co-founding Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in December 2025. LeCun is widely recognized for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks, and he co-created the DjVu image compression technology with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner. He also 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 for their breakthroughs in Deep learning. Along with Bengio and Hinton, and occasionally Jürgen Schmidhuber, LeCun is sometimes referred to as one of the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning."
Early life and education
LeCun was born on 8 July 1960 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, a suburb of Paris. His surname, Le Cun, derives from the old Breton form Le Cunff and originates from the Guingamp region in northern Brittany. He earned a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from 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 backpropagation, an algorithm crucial for training neural networks. From 1987, he spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto, supervised by Geoffrey Hinton. LeCun has three sons and holds American citizenship.
Career and research
LeCun's career has spanned Bell Labs, New York University, and Meta Platforms.
Bell Labs
In 1988, LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel. There he developed a biologically inspired model of image recognition called convolutional neural networks (LeNet), the "Optimal Brain Damage" regularization method, and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random fields), which he applied to handwriting recognition and optical character recognition. The bank check recognition system he helped develop was widely deployed by NCR and other companies. In 1996, he became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research, where he worked on the DjVu image compression technology, used by the Internet Archive for digitized texts. His collaborators included Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.
New York University
After a brief fellowship at NEC Research Institute, LeCun joined New York University in 2003, where he is Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science. At NYU, he has worked on energy-based models for supervised and unsupervised learning, feature learning for object recognition, and mobile robotics. In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. In 2013, he co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations with Yoshua Bengio, which adopted a post-publication open review process he had advocated. He also chaired the annual "Learning Workshop" in Snowbird, Utah, from 1986 to 2012. LeCun is a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA and co-directs the Learning in Machines and Brain research program of CIFAR. In 2016, he was a visiting professor at the Collège de France in Paris, and in 2023 he was named the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute. He also serves as a scientific advisor to the French research group Kyutai.
Meta Platforms
LeCun joined Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2013 as chief AI scientist and led the company's AI research laboratory, FAIR. He remained in that role for over a decade, contributing to advances in Generative AI and self-supervised learning.
AMI Labs
On 19 November 2025, LeCun confirmed he would leave Meta to found his own company focused on world-model architectures and human-like artificial intelligence, which he calls superintelligence. The company, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), is run by CEO Alex LeBrun, with LeCun serving as Executive Chair. AMI Labs aims to build AI "world models" that learn to understand the physical world's structure and dynamics, rather than merely predicting text like large language models. In March 2026, AMI announced it had raised $1.03 billion in funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation, with investors including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. In January 2026, LeCun also became founding chair of the Technical Research Board of Logical Intelligence, an AI company developing energy-based reasoning systems.
Honours and awards
LeCun is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the French Académie des Sciences. He has received honorary doctorates from Instituto Politécnico Nacional (2016), EPFL (2018), Université Côte d'Azur (2021), Università di Siena (2023), and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2023). In 2014, he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, and in 2015 the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award. In 2018, he was awarded the IRI Medal and the Harold Pender Award. In 2019, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and, in March 2019, the 2018 Turing Award, shared with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research."