AI is at the forefront of technological advances and is also reshaping creativity, ownership and societal interactions. In episode 7 of Penn Engineering’s Innovation & Impact podcast, host Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering and Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, speaks with Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, about the journey of AI, how we define intelligence and the possibilities and challenges it presents.

With a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, LeCun’s academic background brought him to the AT&T Bell Laboratories after his first postdoctoral position in 1988, right at the cusp of the Internet Age. The work he began in his doctorate and later expanded on at Bell Labs would eventually become the foundational work for what we now know as AI. As testament to this work, LeCun was awarded the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing," a lifetime accomplishment in the field of computer science.

Listen to the full episode to hear more on everything from the intelligence of the neural nets that inspired LeCun’s original AI research to computers learning to play chess and how much longer we will have to wait to see machines reach a human level of intelligence.

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