Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to exit and launch own start-up
(LeCun reportedly was an expert in France in the 80s while AT&T was breaking up, then he joined Bell Labs and figured out OCR using neutral networks. People had been working on print and character generation and recognition in prior decades, but the techniques were very limited. Lucent eventually acquired the Labs. He later was at NEC before NYU. Alcatel merged with Lucent afterward. Nokia has the Labs now. Incidentally, the upcoming Gemini 3 was said to be getting really good at handwriting rec, so there may be hope for all those notes. Of course, cognitive architecture is a different problem set.)