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

by Cade Metz

His breakthrough was a variation on the neural network modeled on the visual cortex,4 the part of the brain that handles sight. Inspired by the work of a Japanese computer scientist named Kunihiko Fukushima, he called this a “convolutional neural network.” Just as different sections of the visual cortex process different sections of the light captured by your eyes, a convolutional neural network cut an image into squares and analyzed each one separately, finding small patterns in these squares and building them into larger patterns as information moved through its web of (faux) neurons. It was an idea that would define LeCun’s career. “If Geoff Hinton is a fox, then Yann LeCun is a hedgehog,” says University of California–Berkeley professor Jitendra Malik, borrowing a familiar analogy from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “Hinton is bubbling with these ideas, zillions and zillions of ideas bouncing in different directions. Yann is much more single-minded. The fox knows many little things and the hedgehog knows one big thing.”