Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

One year, Clément Farabet,8 one of his PhD students, built a neural network that could analyze a video and separate different kinds of objects—the trees from the buildings, the cars from the people. It was a step toward computer vision for robots or self-driving cars, able to perform its task with fewer errors than other methods and at faster speeds, but reviewers at one of the leading vision conferences summarily rejected the paper. LeCun responded with a letter to the conference chair saying that the reviews were so ridiculous, he didn’t know how to begin writing a rebuttal without insulting the reviewers. The conference chair posted the letter online for all to see, and though he removed LeCun’s name, it was obvious who had written it.