The rise of Yann LeCun, the 65-year-old NYU professor who is planning to leave Mark Zuckerberg's highly paid team at Meta to launch his own AI startup | Fortune

"Yann LeCun, one of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence (AI) today, has informed colleagues he plans to leave Meta within the coming months to launch his own startup, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the conversations. His departure would mark a significant turning point for both Meta and the broader AI industry, as LeCun-a Turing Award winner and pioneering researcher-pursues his vision for next-generation AI systems."

"LeCun, 65, joined Facebook in December 2013 as the founding director of Fundamental AI Research, known as FAIR. He remains a Silver Professor at New York University, where he has taught since 2003. His academic credentials are formidable: LeCun is best known for developing convolutional neural networks in the late 1980s, specifically the LeNet architecture that successfully recognized handwritten digits and revolutionized computer vision. In 2019, he received the ACM Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of modern computing."

"Born in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France, on July 8, 1960, LeCun grew up with an engineer father who encouraged his fascination with electronics. That early curiosity led him to ESIEE Paris, where he earned an electrical engineering diploma in 1983. He then pursued a PhD in computer science at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, completing his dissertation in 1987 on connectionist learning models-work that proposed an early form of the backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks."

Yann LeCun plans to leave Meta within months to found a startup aimed at developing next-generation AI systems. LeCun joined Facebook in December 2013 as the founding director of Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and remains a Silver Professor at New York University since 2003. He pioneered convolutional neural networks and the LeNet architecture for handwritten digit recognition, helping to transform computer vision. He shared the 2019 ACM Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio for deep learning breakthroughs. Born in 1960 in France, he earned an engineering diploma from ESIEE Paris and a 1987 PhD on connectionist learning models.

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