LeCun already worked on essentially convnets in the late 80s, early 90s. And arguably Fukushima's Neocognitron in the 70s was a CNN, it just didnt use backprop.

LeCun already worked on essentially convnets in the late 80s, early 90s. And arguably Fukushima's Neocognitron in the 70s was a CNN, it just didnt use backprop. Btw Fukushima invented ReLU in the 60s. I won't go full Schmidhuber, but the field didn't suddenly spring into existence with LeCun. And in a broader way, it seems that people don't realize that the very inception of computing was intertwined with the goals of AI. It wasn't like people invented computers to plan rocket ballistic paths and manage bank transactions and make spreadsheets and then decades later someone realized that this thing could also do AI stuff. In the first half of the 20th century, computing pioneers were all about trying to imitate/model human reasoning. Which is an endeavor grown out of computing theory and logic, Turing's story is entangled with Gödel and Hilbert. And centuries before, Leibniz equated rational human reasoning with computation. And the complicated logic circuits built with electronics resembled nerve cell activity, most prominently realized by McCulloch and Pitts in the 1940s.