He holds a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from ESIEE Paris and a PhD in Computer Science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne), where he proposed early forms of the backpropagation algorithm.

A professor at New York University since 2003, LeCun is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern AI. He invented convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which transformed computer vision, and in 2018 was awarded the Turing Award — the Nobel Prize of computing — alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.

As founding director of Meta's FAIR lab from 2013, he spent over a decade building one of the world's leading AI research organizations, championing open science and shaping the field's direction. He left Meta in 2025 to co-found AMI and pursue his conviction that a fundamental paradigm shift — beyond large language models — is needed to reach true machine intelligence.