# Yann LeCun Yann LeCun (b. 1960) is a French-American computer scientist, one of the three "godfathers of deep learning" who shared the 2018 Turing Award with [[Geoffrey Hinton]] and [[Yoshua Bengio]]. He pioneered the Convolutional Neural Network in the late 1980s — the architecture that would later power modern [[Computer Vision]] — and since 2013 has been Chief AI Scientist at [[Meta]], where he shaped its influential open-source AI strategy (the Llama models). LeCun is notable in the vault's AI-discourse map as the most prominent **skeptic of [[AI Doomerism]]** among the field's leaders. He publicly dismisses near-term existential-risk fears as overblown, argues current LLMs are far from genuine intelligence, and champions open-source AI against what he frames as fear-driven regulatory capture by incumbent labs. This puts him in direct, often combative public opposition to safety-focused figures (including his fellow godfathers Hinton and Bengio, who lean toward caution) — a useful anchor for the optimist pole of the AI-risk debate. ## See Also - Convolutional Neural Network — his foundational contribution - [[AI Doomerism]] — the discourse he pushes back against - [[Geoffrey Hinton]] · [[Yoshua Bengio]] — fellow deep-learning godfathers