#Yann LeCun

The Meta AI chief scientist who has spent his career doing foundational deep learning work, winning the Turing Award alongside Hinton and Bengio, and is now the most prominent voice disagreeing with the catastrophic AI risk narrative. Why the person who built so much of what AI is has such a different view of where it is going — and why his disagreement deserves as much serious attention as the warnings of those who fear AI most.

The personal story of Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and their collaborators during the years when neural network research was marginalised, underfunded, and dismissed. The decades of intellectual courage, the specific ideas that kept the research programme alive, and the slow accumulation of results that eventually made the field pay attention. How the most important research programme in modern AI survived by going underground.

He invented convolutional neural networks, built the first AI system to process real-world visual data at scale, and became the architect of Meta's AI empire. The most argumentative of the Godfathers of Deep Learning — and why his arguments, however combative the delivery, usually turn out to be right.