Yann André Le Cun (pronounced /ləˈkʌn/; French: [ləkœ̃]; usually spelled LeCun; born August 8, 1960) is a French-American computer scientist who works in areas such as 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 previously worked as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before joining his own company.

He is known for his research on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). He also helped create the DjVu image compression technology with 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 (ACM) for their work on deep learning. These four individuals, including Jürgen Schmidhuber, are sometimes called the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning."

Early life and education

Yann LeCun was born on July 8, 1960, in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, a town in the suburbs of Paris. His family name, Le Cun, comes from the old Breton name Le Cunff, which was used in the area of Guingamp in northern Brittany. The name "Yann" is the Breton version of the name "John."

In 1983, he earned an engineering degree from ESIEE Paris. In 1987, he received a PhD in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie, now known as Sorbonne University. During his studies, he developed an early version of the back-propagation algorithm used to train neural networks. Before working at AT&T, he spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher, starting in 1987, under the guidance of Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.

LeCun has three sons, and his brother works for Google. He became a citizen of the United States.

Career and research

Yann LeCun has worked mainly at Bell Labs, New York University, and Meta Platforms, Inc.

In 1988, he joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States. This department was led by Lawrence D. Jackel. There, he developed several new machine learning methods, including a model inspired by biology for image recognition called convolutional neural networks (LeNet), a method called "Optimal Brain Damage" for improving machine learning, and a technique called Graph Transformer Networks (similar to conditional random fields). He used these methods for handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR). A bank check recognition system he helped create was widely used by NCR and other companies.

In 1996, he became the head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs–Research. This department was part of Lawrence Rabiner’s Speech and Image Processing Research Lab. His work focused on DjVu, an image compression technology designed for efficiently sharing scanned documents. This format was used by the Internet Archive to provide access to digitized texts. His collaborators at AT&T included Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.

After a short time at NEC Research Institute, LeCun joined New York University in 2003. At NYU, he became the Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Neural Science. His research focused on energy-based models for learning, feature learning for object recognition in computer vision, and mobile robotics.

In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. On December 9, 2013, he became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York City. In early 2014, he left his role as director of the NYU Center for Data Science.

In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio started the International Conference on Learning Representations. This conference used an open review process he had previously supported. He also organized the "Learning Workshop" held annually from 1986 to 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is a member of the Science Advisory Board at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. He is also a co-director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) at CIFAR.

In 2016, he was a visiting professor at Collège de France in Paris, where he gave an inaugural lecture. 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 Kyutai, a French research group funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.

LeCun joined Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2013 as chief AI scientist and led the company’s AI research laboratory, FAIR.

On November 19, 2025, LeCun announced he would leave Meta after ten years to start his own company focused on world-model architectures and human-like artificial intelligence, which he calls superintelligence.

The company he founded, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), is led by CEO Alex LeBrun, with LeCun as Executive Chair. The company aims to build AI "world models"—systems that learn to understand the structure and movement of the physical world, rather than just predicting text like large language models.

In March 2026, AMI announced it had raised $1.03 billion in funding, with a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. The funding round was led by investors including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.

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 received honorary doctorates from Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City in 2016, from EPFL in 2018, from Université Côte d'Azur in 2021, from Università di Siena in 2023, and from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023.

In 2014, he was awarded the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award. In 2015, he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.

In 2018, LeCun was given the IRI Medal, established by the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), and the Harold Pender Award, given by the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2019, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

In March 2019, LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, shared with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the "Scientific Research" category, along with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Demis Hassabis.

In 2023, the President of France made him a Chevalier (Knight) of the French Legion of Honour.

During the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2024 in Davos, he received the Global Swiss AI Award 2023. The same year, he won the grand prize of the VinFuture Prize alongside Yoshua Bengio, Jensen Huang, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li for their work on neural networks and deep learning algorithms.

In 2025, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, shared with Yoshua Bengio, Bill Dally, Geoffrey E. Hinton, John Hopfield, Jensen Huang, and Fei-Fei Li.