[peterth3]

Can we stop labeling prominent AI researchers as “AI Godfather”? It’s so silly and barely truthful.

The concept of AI has been around since Turing and if anyone deserves a title like “Father of AI” it’s him.

LeCun is Chief AI Scientist at Meta. They can just leave it at that.

[redox99]

LeCun is not called AI godfather because of his job at meta, but becase of pioneering CNNs in 1989.

[GaggiX]

LeCun is the main author of the paper "Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition" 1989, the earliest real-world application of a neural net trained end-to-end with backpropagation. "AI godfather" is fair enough.

[moelf]

that term usually refers to one of the three people got Turing award in 2018: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun,

[mliker]

LeCun’s research into Convolutional Neural Networks contributed to modern AI, so the nickname is quite appropriate. It’s because of this that he was pursued by Facebook.

[randomdata]

According to the dictionary, godfather is defined as: "a man who is influential or pioneering in a movement or organization"

Are these prominent AI researches not seen as being prominent exactly because they influenced movement in relation to AI?

[peterth3]

That’s definition #2 with #1 being:

> a man who presents a child at baptism and promises to take responsibility for their religious education.

So, the original definition is a gendered and religious term.

Sounds silly to me. Especially in this context.

[randomdata]

Clearly #1 has no applicability here and the intent is to convey #2, which is quite apt. Words have multiple meanings. Such is life.

[manc_lad]

Turing is a Godfather of AI. But you can't say there never will be another. In light of recent achievements there should be new pioneers and Godfathers. Its the nature of innovation.