Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and a Turing Award laureate, has long been a pivotal figure in artificial intelligence. During the past year, however, his work has not only continued to push the boundaries of AI research but also sparked critical discussions about how society should approach the opportunities and risks posed by this transformative technology.

Born in 1960 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, France, LeCun has been a driving force in AI innovation. From being the founding director of the New York University Center for Data Science in 2012, and co-founding Meta AI in 2013, to shaping the future of open-source artificial intelligence, LeCun’s pragmatic vision makes him Emerge’s Person of the Year.

“On the technical side, he’s been a visionary. There are only a couple of people you could genuinely say that about, and he’s one of them,” New York University Professor of Computer Science Rob Fergus told Decrypt in an interview. “More recently, his advocacy for open-source and open research has been crucial to the Cambrian explosion of startups and people building on these large language models.”

Fergus is an American computer scientist specializing in machine learning, deep learning, and generative models. A professor at NYU’s Courant Institute and researcher at Google DeepMind, he co-founded Meta AI (formerly Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) with Yann LeCun in September 2013.

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Author: Jason Nelson