LeCun has played a key role in Meta’s artificial intelligence ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 and founded Facebook AI Research (FAIR), an in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders.
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Over the course of 12 years, he served as FAIR’s founding director five times and the company’s lead AI scientist seven times, leading breakthroughs in deep learning, computer vision, and large-scale language modeling that power products such as Instagram’s recommendations and Meta’s generative AI system.
He developed an early form of artificial neural network that mimics the way the human eye and brain process images. This is the technology that would later become the backbone of modern image recognition and GenAI.
LeCun, 65, said his new venture will be researching advanced machine intelligence (AMI). The project was developed in collaboration with colleagues at FAIR, where he teaches, and New York University.
The computer scientist said he would announce details about the new company at a later date, but added that Meta would be a partner in the venture, reflecting Meta’s “continued interest and support” in AMI’s long-term goals.
“Creating FAIR is my proudest non-technical accomplishment,” he wrote. “The impact FAIR has had on the meta, the AI field, and the wider world is remarkable.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth both credit LeCun with laying the foundation for Meta’s current AI infrastructure, including the open-source Llama model that became the foundation of a global AI research community.
LeCun is widely regarded as one of the “godfathers” of deep learning, along with Jeffrey Hinton and Joshua Bengio, the trio who won the 2018 Turing Award, also known as the Nobel Prize of computing.
Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru. Editing: Alan Barona
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