High energy: Facebook's AI guru LeCun imagines AI's next frontier ZDNet

Facebook's head of artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun, seems to fit that profile to a T. "I work mostly by intuition," he writes in When the Machine Learns, a new book that is part biography, part science lecture, part AI history, published Wednesday in French as Quand la machine apprend. "I project in my head the borderline cases, that which Einstein called the'thought experiments'," writes LeCun. LeCun is animated on stage, clearly energized by trying to convey things at the edges of AI that have come from his thought experiments. That ability to imagine something that doesn't exist, perhaps at the limit of what's generally thought feasible, is the mark of engineers and innovators. LeCun is something of a rarity among the AI crowd, a scientist who is at home in algorithm design but also has one foot firmly in computer engineering.