Yann LeCun

Yann André Le Cun ( ; French:; 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. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before co-founding Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs in December 2025.

He is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology, alongside Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner. He 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 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".