Photo: Jérémy Barande, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Yann LeCun
Executive Chairman & Founder, AMI Labs
AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence) (opens in a new tab)New York, United States
A Turing Award laureate and pioneer of convolutional neural networks who served as Meta's Chief AI Scientist for over a decade. He left Meta at the end of 2025 to found AMI Labs, a startup building AI "world models" that learn from sensory data rather than language alone; the company raised a $1.03 billion seed round in March 2026 at a $3.5 billion valuation.
Research background
LeCun is a professor at New York University and one of three researchers - alongside Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton - credited with the deep-learning advances that underpin modern AI; the three shared the 2018 Turing Award. Earlier in his career he led AI research at Bell Labs before building and heading Meta's AI research organisation.
At AMI Labs, former Nabla co-founder and CEO Alex LeBrun runs the company as CEO while LeCun serves as Executive Chairman, pursuing the "Advanced Machine Intelligence" research programme he described as the continuation of his Meta-era work on systems that understand the physical world, hold persistent memory, and can plan.
Research and public work
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