Facebook AI director Yann LeCun explains how he hires the smartest minds in the world

US tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into artificial intelligence as they look to make their platforms and personal assistants that it smarter. Part of this effort involves finding and hiring the brightest minds in the world. But with so many large companies involved in the so-called "AI race" it's not always easy to recruit the best talent. Yann LeCun, the director of Facebook AI Research and one of the world's most prominent AI academics, told Business Insider last week that he employs certain tactics to get people to come and work for him. "There's various things ... but a lot of it is nurturing relationships with academic laboratories that have a track record of producing interesting students," said LeCun, who is also a professor at New York University.