As the head of AI research at Facebook, LeCun oversees the creation of vast "neural networks" that can recognize photos and respond to everyday human language. And similar work is driving speech recognition on Google's Android phones, instant language translation on Microsoft's Skype service, and so many other online tools that can "learn" over time. Using vast networks of computer processors, these systems approximate the networks of neurons inside the human brain, and in some ways, they can outperform humans themselves.

This week in the scientific journal Nature, LeCun—also a professor of computer science at New York University—details the current state of this "deep learning" technology in a paper penned alongside the two other academics most responsible for this movement: University of Toronto professor Geoff Hinton, who's now at Google, and the University of Montreal's Yoshua Bengio. The paper details the widespread progress of deep learning in recent years, showing the wider scientific community how this technology is reshaping our internet services—and how it will continue to reshape them in the years to come.