Yann LeCun

Bell Labs

In 1988, LeCun joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States, headed by Lawrence D. Jackel, where he developed a number of new machine learning methods, such as a biologically inspired model of image recognition called convolutional neural networks (LeNet),^[14] the "Optimal Brain Damage" regularization methods,^[15] and the Graph Transformer Networks method (similar to conditional random field), which he applied to handwriting recognition and Optical character recognition (OCR).^[16] The bank check recognition system that he helped develop was widely deployed by NCR and other companies.^[17]

In 1996, he joined AT&T Labs-Research as head of the Image Processing Research Department, which was part of Lawrence Rabiner's Speech and Image Processing Research Lab, and worked primarily on the DjVu image compression technology,^[18] a format designed for efficient distribution of scanned documents,^[19] and used by the Internet Archive to provide access to digitized texts.^[20] His collaborators at AT&T include Léon Bottou and Vladimir Vapnik.

New York University

After a brief tenure as a fellow of NEC Research Institute, LeCun joined New York University in 2003, where he is Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor of Computer Science and Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Neural Science.^[21][22] At NYU, he has worked primarily on energy-based models for supervised and unsupervised learning,^[23] feature learning for object recognition in computer vision,^[24] and mobile robotics.^[25]

In 2012, he became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science.^[26] On 9 December 2013, LeCun became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York City and in early 2014 stepped down from the NYU–CDS directorship.^[27]

In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website. He was the chair and organiser of the "Learning Workshop" held every year between 1986 and 2012 in Snowbird, Utah. He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics^[28] at UCLA. He is the co-director of the Learning in Machines and Brain research program (formerly Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception) of CIFAR.^[29]

In 2016, he was the visiting professor of computer science on the Chaire Annuelle Informatique et Sciences Numériques at Collège de France in Paris, where he presented the leçon inaugurale (inaugural lecture).^[30] In 2023, he was named as the inaugural Jacob T. Schwartz Chaired Professor in Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute.^[31] LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.^[32]

Meta Platforms

LeCun joined Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2013 as chief AI scientist and led the company's AI research laboratory, FAIR.

AMI Labs

On 19 November 2025, LeCun confirmed that he would be leaving Meta after ten years to found his own company focused on world-model architectures and human-like artificial intelligence he calls superintelligence.^[7][33][34]

The company he founded, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (or AMI Labs), is run by CEO Alex LeBrun, with LeCun serving as Executive Chair.^[35] This venture is focused on building AI "world models": systems that learn to understand the physical world's structure and dynamics rather than just predict text like large language models.^[36]

In March 2026, AMI announced it had raised $1.03 billion in funding at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. The funding round was co-led by investors including Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital and Bezos Expeditions.^[37][38]

In January 2026, LeCun became founding chair of the Technical Research Board of Logical Intelligence, an AI company developing energy-based (EBM) reasoning systems.^[39]