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Comment by peterth3 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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