Inside Facebook's Quest for Software That Understands You

The first time Yann LeCun revolutionized artificial intelligence, it was a false dawn. It was 1995, and for almost a decade, the young Frenchman had been dedicated to what many computer scientists considered a bad idea: that crudely mimicking certain features of the brain was the best way to bring about intelligent machines. But LeCun had shown that this approach could produce something strikingly smart--and useful. Working at Bell Labs, he made software that roughly simulated neurons and learned to read handwritten text by looking at many different examples. Bell Labs' corporate parent, AT&T, used it to sell the first machines capable of reading the handwriting on checks and written forms. To LeCun and a few fellow believers in artificial neural networks, it seemed to mark the beginning of an era in which machines could learn many other skills previously limited to humans. "This whole project kind of disappeared on the day of its biggest success," says LeCun. On the same day he celebrated the launch of bank machines that could read thousands of checks per hour, AT&T announced it was splitting into three companies dedicated to different markets in communications and computing. LeCun became head of research at a slimmer AT&T and was directed to work on other things; in 2002 he would leave AT&T, soon to become a professor at New York University.