Yann LeCun

Executive Chairman, AMI Labs · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

scientistacademicexecutivefounderengineer@ylecun ↗LinkedIn ↗yann.lecun.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award alongside Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton for pioneering breakthroughs in deep learning and convolutional neural networks. He served as the founding director of FAIR and Meta's Chief AI Scientist before launching AMI Labs.

17statements → 11claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 4.06/5average certainty → 2.18/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 31said about them ↓

3 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 7 assertions · 3 opinions · 1 insight · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Yann argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up

LeCun predicted in 2014 that AI would mediate human social interactions

“And started thinking about the next 10 years. What are the next 10 years going to be for social interactions? And it's pretty obvious to a lot of people that a lot of our interactions you know, with our friends and a lot of interactions with the digital world …”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 11:50 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

100% certainty 3

75% certainty 4

none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

262 words/min while actually speaking · 63.9 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Yann LeCun: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 7,796 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said17 What others said31 Episodes1

Everything Yann LeCun said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

LeCun: Simulating biological brain neurons to achieve AI is 'completely nuts'

“There are people out there in Europe that, that have argued for the fact to kind of study neurons and neurons and neural networks natural neural networks in all the details, and then build giant supercomputers to simulate this very accurately, and somehow they…”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 44:20 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Opinion

LeCun: Building chips for spiking neural networks is misguided

“The problem is, from the engineering point of view, nobody has actually demonstrated that spiking neurons actually work. Like there is no image recognition systems that are based on spiking neural networks. Why build chips for something we don't know works? So…”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 45:17 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

LeCun: The window for deep learning startups will close quickly

“The window is going to close really quickly on, on deep learning you know, sort of opportunity for startups in deep learning.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 32:31 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

LeCun: Building superintelligent AI will take a long time

“Building machines that are super intelligent, you know, more intelligent than humans is going to take a long time.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 37:58 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Opinion

LeCun: The public thinks AI is more dangerous than it is

“The public thinks it's more dangerous than it actually is, so there is a whole segment of the public that will be extremely scared about the potential of AI, and that need, you know, the real dangers and the false dangers need to be explained.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 39:52 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

LeCun: Backprop designs vision systems better than human engineers

“In fact, those dumb learning algorithms, Backprop, namely, is better at designing vision systems than very experienced engineers and scientists are at designing vision systems.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 41:04 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

LeCun: Deep learning designs NLP systems better than linguists

“You know, those deep learning algorithms are better at designing NLP systems than linguists are, or natural language specialists.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 41:25 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Held up

LeCun predicted in 2014 that AI would mediate human social interactions

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 11:50 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Prediction Held up

LeCun predicted in 2014 deep learning would conquer natural language processing

“There's a kind of a sense that in the community that the next set of techniques to kind of fall to deep learning, if you want, will be natural language processing.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 26:15 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

LeCun: Deep learning's rapid industry adoption surprised early AI pioneers

“I mean, the whole success of deep learning, actually has taken some of us by surprise. We were all sort of Convinced from a long time ago that deep learning was going to take off at some point, but the speed at which has been picked up by, ah, industry and res…”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 1:17 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

LeCun turned down Larry Page's offer to direct Google's research lab

“And they offered me the job, and I turned it down.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 8:34 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Partly supported

LeCun: Apple, Android, and Microsoft mobile speech recognition use deep learning

“So probably many of you know that most You know, mobile speech recognition application search and stuff like that uses deep learning for the last two years. This is both for, you know, Apple, Android, Microsoft. All of those applications use deep learning for …”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 15:27 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Disclosure

LeCun: Facebook stole Word2Vec creator Tomasz Mikolov from Google

“I should mention that Tomasz Mikolov now works at Facebook AI Research. I stole him from Google.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 28:34 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

LeCun: Industry adopted deep learning faster than academia

“Industry picked up on deep learning faster than academia.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 29:22 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Supported

LeCun: AT&T's neural net read 20% of US checks in late 1990s

“Which at some point in the nineties were, in the late nineties, was reading something like 20% of all the checks in the U.S.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 5:30 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Insight

LeCun: Deep learning automates feature engineering by integrating representation with classification

“And deep learning basically opens the possibility that you, to automate the process of feature engineering. So, it essentially learns to, It integrates the process of producing good representations with the process of learning a classifier in one fell swoop.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 17:47 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Assertion Partly supported

LeCun: ConvNet training times dropped from two weeks to two days

“The first large convolutional nets that are appropriate for object recognition came up about two and a half years ago, and it would take about two weeks to train. The latest versions with the latest software implementations, we can train in about two days.”

Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 21:55 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

The other half of the tape: Yann LeCun's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 30 times in 18 episodes on the MAD Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Matt Turck 6 Jerome Pesenti 5 Neil Zeghidour 3 Antoine Bordes 3 William Falcon 2 Matthew Zeiler 2 Jeremy Howard 2 Yann Dubois 1