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H2O AI 100 H2O AI 100

Dr. Yann LeCun

Title: VP, Chief AI Scientist

Organization: Meta

AI Highlight: Launched Llama 31, an open-source, top performing AI model that enhances AI accessibility

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Yann LeCun is a French-American computer scientist born on July 8, 1960, in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France. He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers in the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence. LeCun received his Electrical Engineer Diploma from ESIEE Paris in 1983 and his PhD in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne University) in 1987. 

Throughout his career, LeCun has made significant contributions to machine learning, computer vision, and robotics. He is best known for his work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have become a critical component in image recognition and processing. LeCun joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1988 and later became the head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs- Research in 1996. In 2003, he joined New York University as a professor.

In 2013, LeCun became the first director of Facebook's (now Meta's) AI Research division. He currently serves as Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at Meta while maintaining his position as a Silver Professor at NYU. In 2018, LeCun was awarded the Turing Award, often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing," along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, for their groundbreaking work on deep learning.