ClaimsYann LeCun

“Every day, users upload 2 to 3 billion photos on Facebook.”

Yann LeCun, FAIR researcher, paper author 2019 ISSCC 2019 Plenary: Deep Learning Hardware: Past, Present and Future (yann.lecun.com)

Factual AI compute, hardware and data

Users upload 2 to 3 billion photos on Facebook every day.

Mostly false False in substance, right in a detail.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

What would count as true or false

Judge as of 2019. True: Facebook or Meta figures, or reliable reporting from around 2018–2019, put daily photo uploads to Facebook (the claim's scope; figures including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger count only if Facebook's own share is in range) between about 2 and 3 billion. Mostly true: the figure is just outside the range (within about 10%, e.g. 1.8–3.3 billion) or the cited figure includes the company's other apps. Mixed: the sources conflict, some inside and some well outside the range. Mostly false: the documented figure is well outside the range but the same order of magnitude (e.g. 300–350 million for Facebook alone, with 2–3 billion only for all apps). False: the figure is an order of magnitude off with no reasonable basis.

Set before the research began.

Evidence (1)

  1. E1 The Scale of Creative Work Uploaded to the Internet Per Second Spectralplex · 27 June 2019

    “Facebook mentioned in an Internet.org white paper that users are uploading 350 million photos per day, or nearly 2.5 billion photos every week.”

Reasoning

E1, a 2019 independent article, cites a Facebook figure from an Internet.org white paper of 350 million photos uploaded per day (nearly 2.5 billion per week). That is well below the claimed 2–3 billion per day but of the same order of magnitude. The 2.5 billion figure is a weekly total, not a daily one. The resolution criteria name 300–350 million per day for Facebook alone as a mostly false outcome, though this rests on a single source repeating a figure from an Internet.org white paper [E1].

Cite this claim

Yann LeCun, “Users upload 2 to 3 billion photos on Facebook every day.” (said 2019). Verdict: mostly false. Reliability API, claim c_d934ce7592bf, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_d934ce7592bf

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Yann LeCun, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More factual claims by Yann LeCun

  1. Mostly true Factual 2021
    “So the amount of training data there is essentially unlimited.”

    The amount of image training data available for self-supervised learning is essentially unlimited, with billions of new images per day.

  2. Mostly true Factual 18 February 2015
    “Now, imagine a box with 500 million knobs, 1,000 light bulbs, and 10 million images to train it with.”

    A typical Deep Learning system is like a box with 500 million knobs, 1,000 light bulbs and 10 million training images.

  3. Mostly true Factual 2010
    “An actual face detection application was demonstrated on this system, achieving 10fps on VGA images [52].”

    A face detection application on the CNP system was demonstrated achieving 10 fps on VGA images.

  4. Resolved false Factual 1 October 2026
    ““Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do,” LeCun said.”

    The OpenAI agents involved in the Hugging Face hacking incident were doing exactly what they had been asked to do.

  5. Resolved true Factual 1 October 2026
    ““It’s AI for the physical world, so it’s not language-related,” LeCun said.”

    AMI Labs' work is AI for the physical world and is not language-related.

All of them

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