A researcher of Breton origin and pioneer of deep learning, Yann Le Cun received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from King Charles III at St James’s Palace. He is distinguished alongside Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Fei-Fei Li, Jensen Huang and Bill Dally for contributions that have shaped modern AI.
St James’s Palace — November 5, 2025. The researcher of Breton origin Yann Le Cun (Yann Lecun for the Americans), world figure in artificial intelligence and architect of deep neural networks (deep learning), received at St James’s Palace the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize), awarded by King Charles III. Le Cun is distinguished alongside Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Fei-Fei Li, Jensen Huang and Bill Dally for seminal contributions that shaped modern AI.
The ceremony honored seven pioneers whose work supports today’s AI revolution:
– scaling of neural networks (Bengio, Hinton, Hopfield, Le Cun);
– the rise of hardware platforms for training (Huang, Dally);
– and the reference datasets (Fei-Fei Li).
The best-known Breton in the international sphere
Born in Paris to a Breton father, Yann Le Cun is scientific director of AI at Meta and professor at New York University. His work on convolutional neural networks revolutionized computer vision. With Bengio and Hinton, in 2018 he received the Turing Prize, often considered the “ Nobel Prize in Computer Science “. Today, he travels to universities on four continents where he gives lectures.
For the scientific ecosystem as well as for the industry, this year the QEPrize celebrates more than two decades of advances which have made image recognition possible (when you put a check in a cash machine, it is an algorithm by Yann Lecun which reads the amount), automatic translation, voice assistants and hardware acceleration dedicated to AI. A recognition that also resonates in Brittany, land of engineers, laboratories and start-ups active in AI and data processing.
“This year’s prize honours seven pioneers whose work has shaped modern artificial intelligence… Together, their contributions underpin the AI revolution.” — message partagé lors de la cérémonie.
True to its roots
Yann Le Cun was a bombard ringer in his youth and returns to Côtes-d’Armor for one or two weeks every summer. A Breton nod that takes nothing away from the news of the day — the international recognition of a major scientific journey. (The joke goes that playing the bombard “ oxygenates the neurons » is to be taken with humor.)
During a recent video intervention in Quimper, last May on the occasion of the anniversary of .bzh, he addressed the issues of digitizing Breton and the importance of creating a corpus.
