LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are widely considered the godfathers of AI because they invented many of the techniques that power today’s AI models.

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers of AI’ — have been recognized with the $1 million annual prize for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning. The techniques the trio developed in the 1990s and 2000s enabled huge breakthroughs in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work underpins the current proliferation of AI technologies, from self-driving cars to automated medical diagnoses.

While I strongly disagree with YeCun’s perspective on AI, and feel that he’s sold out by joining Facebook, you can’t really argue with his credentials.