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He Invented a Core Technology Behind ChatGPT. Now He’s Betting $1 Billion It’s a Dead End.
Here’s why the rest of the industry should be listening.
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There’s a particular credibility that only comes from being wrong in public and then being vindicated by history. Yann LeCun has earned it twice.
In the 1980s, he was one of the few researchers in the world still working on neural networks. This was not a popular position. A prolonged period of limited funding, dubbed an “AI winter” by insiders, gripped the field. This was attributed to the prevailing sentiment that neural networks were a dead-end technology, prohibitively expensive to compute, and improbable to expand. LeCun kept working anyway.
In the 1990s, his architecture was being used by American banks to read handwritten digits on over 20 million cheques every day. By the 2000s, computing power had improved enough that everyone else caught up with what he’d been doing for two decades. In 2012, the models he’d spent years on quietly transformed artificial intelligence. In 2018, he shared the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computer science, with Yoshua Bengio and…
