How Facebook's Yann LeCun is charting a path to human-level artificial intelligence

When Yann LeCun founded the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab in 2013, artificial intelligence was entering a boom period that his research helped trigger. Facebook's chief AI scientist had been among a group of computer scientists who retained faith in deep neural networks during an "AI winter" of reduced funding and interest in the field. In 2019, his efforts earned him a share of the Turning Award, together with his friends Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. Today, AI is now an essential component of Facebook's vast array of applications, touching everything from Messenger to content moderation. "You take AI out of Facebook, and basically the services crumble," LeCun tells TNW. But fears are now emerging that another winter will soon arrive if AI can't live up to its current hype, particularly around the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI): the idea that a machine can perform any intellectual task a human can -- and many that they can't.