Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is a French-American computer scientist regarded as one of the founding figures of modern deep learning. Beginning in the late 1980s at Bell Labs, he pioneered convolutional neural networks — the architecture behind much of today's computer vision, and used commercially to read handwritten cheques long before the deep-learning boom. For that body of work he shared the 2018 ACM Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor at New York University and founded the NYU Center for Data Science.

From 2013 to 2025 LeCun served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta, where he founded and shaped its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab and became one of the field's most outspoken public voices — a consistent sceptic of pure large-language-model scaling and an advocate of self-supervised “world models.” After leaving Meta at the end of 2025, he became Executive Chair of Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), a venture built around that world-model thesis.

LeCun is also an active angel investor in frontier-AI companies, typically backing early-stage, deeply technical teams. Dealroom tracks his investment in Perplexity, the AI answer engine, alongside the autonomous-driving company Wayve. His presence on AI cap tables reflects both his standing as a deep-learning pioneer and his conviction that the field must move beyond text toward systems that perceive, reason about and plan in the physical world.