He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

[2] He received a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the ESIEE Paris in 1983 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (today Sorbonne University) in 1987 during which he proposed an early form of the back-propagation learning algorithm for neural networks.

[25] On 9 December 2013, LeCun became the first director of Meta AI Research in New York City,[26][non-primary source needed][27] and stepped down from the NYU-CDS directorship in early 2014.

In 2013, he and Yoshua Bengio co-founded the International Conference on Learning Representations, which adopted a post-publication open review process he previously advocated on his website.

[31] LeCun is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, and others.

He has received honorary doctorates from IPN in Mexico City[34] in 2016, from EPFL[35][36] in 2018, from Université Côte d'Azur in 2021,[37] from Università di Siena in 2023,[38] and from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023.

[47] In 2025 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering jointly with Yoshua Bengio, Bill Dally, Geoffrey E. Hinton, John Hopfield, Jen-Hsun Huang and Fei-Fei Li.