LeCun was born on 8 July 1960, atSoisy-sous-Montmorency in the suburbs of Paris. His name,Le Cun, originates from the oldBreton formLe Cunff, and was from the region ofGuingamp in northernBrittany. "Yann" is the Breton form for "John".[3]
In 1988, LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department atAT&T Bell Laboratories inHolmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition calledconvolutional neural networks (LeNet),[14] the"Optimal Brain Damage" regularization methods,[15] and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar toconditional random field), which he applied to handwriting recognition andOptical character recognition (OCR).[16] The bank check recognition system that he helped develop was widely deployed byNCR and other companies, reading over 10% of all the checks in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s.[citation needed]
In 1996, he joinedAT&T Labs-Research as head of the Image Processing Research Department, which was part ofLawrence Rabiner's Speech and Image Processing Research Lab, and worked primarily on theDjVu image compression technology,[17] used by many websites, notably theInternet Archive, to distribute scanned documents.[citation needed] His collaborators at AT&T includeLéon Bottou andVladimir Vapnik.
In 2012, he became the founding director of theNYU Center for Data Science.[23] On 9 December 2013, LeCun became the first director ofMeta AI Research in New York City and in early 2014 stepped down from the NYU–CDS directorship.[24]
In 2013, he andYoshua Bengio co-founded theInternational Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website. He was the chair and organiser of the "Learning Workshop" held every year between 1986 and 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of theInstitute for Pure and Applied Mathematics[25] atUCLA. He is the co-director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) ofCIFAR.[26]
In 2016, he was the visiting professor of computer science on theChaire Annuelle Informatique et Sciences Numériques atCollège de France in Paris, where he presented theleçon inaugurale (inaugural lecture).[27] In 2023, he was named as the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU'sCourant Institute.[28] LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded byXavier Niel,Rodolphe Saadé,Eric Schmidt, and others.[29]
LeCun joinedFacebook (nowMeta Platforms) in 2013 as chief AI scientist and led the company's AI research laboratory, FAIR. On 19 November 2025, he confirmed that he would be leaving Meta after ten years to found his own company focused onworld-model architectures and human-like artificial intelligence he calls superintelligence.[7][30][31]
The company he founded,Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (or AMI Labs), is run by CEO Alex LeBrun, with LeCun serving as Executive Chair.[32]
In 2018, LeCun was awarded theIRI Medal, established by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI),[40] and theHarold Pender Award, given by the University of Pennsylvania.[41]
^Y. LeCun: Une procédure d'apprentissage pour réseau a seuil asymmetrique (a Learning Scheme for Asymmetric Threshold Networks), Proceedings of Cognitiva 85, 599–604, Paris, France, 1985.
^Yann LeCun, J. S. Denker,S. Solla, R. E. Howard and L. D. Jackel:Optimal Brain Damage, in Touretzky, David (Eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (NIPS*89),Morgan Kaufmann, Denver, CO, 1990.
^Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun: "High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu",Journal of Electronic Imaging, 7(3):410–425, 1998.
^Yann LeCun, Sumit Chopra, Raia Hadsell, Ranzato Marc'Aurelio, Fu-Jie Huang, "A Tutorial on Energy-Based Learning", in Bakir, G. and Hofman, T. and Schölkopf, B. and Smola, A. and Taskar, B. (Eds),Predicting Structured Data,MIT Press, 2006.
^Kevin Jarrett, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Yann LeCun, "What is the Best Multi-Stage Architecture for Object Recognition?",Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'09), IEEE, 2009
^Raia Hadsell, Pierre Sermanet, Marco Scoffier, Ayse Erkan, Koray Kavackuoglu, Urs Muller, Yann LeCun, "Learning Long-Range Vision for Autonomous Off-Road Driving",Journal of Field Robotics, 26(2):120–144, February 2009.
^"News from the National Academy of Sciences". 26 April 2021. Retrieved4 July 2021.Newly elected members and their affiliations at the time of election are: … LeCun, Yann; vice president and chief artificial intelligence scientist, Facebook; and Silver Professor of Computer Science, Data Science, Neural Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York University, New York City
^"Member Directory".nasonline.org. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved4 July 2021.
^"PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award".IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 24 August 2023. Retrieved15 February 2024.
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