Encounter
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Creator of Facebook’s artificial intelligence laboratory and considered by many to be the “godfather of AI”, the French researcher tempers the fantasies linked to ChatGPT and shares his vision of the future, which he imagines made of more sophisticated technologies.
“There is a lot going on in artificial intelligence right now. We hear stories that fuel both positive and negative fantasies, a little extreme in both cases. Straight back, black shirt and glasses with branches of the same color on the nose, Yann Le Cun speaks like a teacher. Hands clasped on the table in front of him, he multiplies the “SO” and the “SO” through explanations and re-explanations. Around him, in a separate room of a chic restaurant in the capital, a dozen journalists drink in his words on Tuesday afternoon.
Unknown to the general public, the 62-year-old Frenchman – he is ten years younger – is nonetheless a big name in the world of artificial intelligence. He distinguished himself for his work on convolutional neurons and deep learning, received the Turing Prize (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science) in 2018 and created FAIR, the artificial intelligence laboratory of Facebook (today hui Meta) in 2013 after Mark Zuckerberg went out of his way to recruit him. In the American media, he is even nicknamed the “godfather of artificial intelligence”.
At a time when digital tools abound – from
