Some may say generative artificial intelligence wade its way into mainstream culture at the debut of ChatGPT in 2022. But the research that laid the foundation for modern AI took decades, and the developers leading it went on to influence major tech companies and policymakers on the most disruptive technology of the 21st century to date.
From Sam Altman to the “godmother of AI,” Fei Fei Li, Quartz walks you through 11 leaders who are informing and advancing modern AI.
Perhaps the most known name in artificial intelligence, Altman is CEO and co-founder of OpenAI. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022 has been credited with popularizing generative AI. The billionaire is a prolific investor with stakes in Reddit, fintech startup Stripe, nuclear energy company Helion, and others. Most recently, Altman invested in clean energy startup Exowatt, whose technology is designed to take on the electricity demands of big data centers that power AI applications.
Geoffrey Hinton became dubbed the “godfather of AI” thanks to his work developing a neural network that could take data from photos to identify objects. A longtime AI researcher at Google, Hinton left the company to warn about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Hinton has spoken about AI’s ability to amplify bias and discrimination, exacerbate unemployment, and spread fake news.
“I’m not convinced that a good AI that is trying to stop bad AI can get control,” Hinton said at the Collision tech conference in Toronto last summer. “Before it’s smarter than us, I think the people developing it should be encouraged to put a lot of work into understanding how it might go wrong — understanding how it might try and take control away. And I think the government could maybe encourage the big companies developing it to put comparable resources [into that].”
Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist whose research in deep learning earned him the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Hinton and Yan LeCun. Bengio led research in Montreal that was foundational for computers’ ability to learn language and generate deepfakes. He was also the founder of research startup Element AI.
A longtime collaborator with Hinton and Bengio, LeCun is Meta’s chief AI scientist whose work in the 1980s and 1990s helped set the stage for modern AI technologies. Like Hinton and Bengio, LeCun was a proponent of artificial neural networks that resemble the human brain to allow for deep learning. LeCun’s role at Meta is focused on using AI to remove misinformation and hate speech.
Nicknamed the “godmother of AI,” Li invented ImageNet, a dataset used for advancing computer vision that many see as a catalyst for the AI boom. Today, Li consults with policymakers as they work to set up guardrails for the technology, and was named one of 12 national AI research resource task force members by the U.S. White House in 2021.
“AI can be used for the public good, especially if we ensure that human agency always remains valued,” she said during a talk at Princeton University in February.
Li is now working to build a spatial intelligence startup that “uses human-like processing of visual data” to make AI capable of advanced reasoning, Reuters reported May 3, citing unnamed sources.
The Amodei siblings co-founded Anthropic, whose chatbot Claude is a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The pair worked at OpenAI before leaving to start Anthropic. Anthropic is designated as a public benefit corporation, meaning it positions its work as a means to generate social and public good.
“We want the transition to more powerful AI systems to be positive to society and the broader economy,” Daniela Amodei told The Atlantic last year. “This is why much of our research is focused on exploring ways to better understand the systems we are developing, mitigate risks, and develop AI systems that are steerable, interpretable, and safe.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky speaks with Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei during AWS re:Invent 2023.
Anthropic recently scored a massive $4 billion deal with the tech giant Amazon, which will use its AI products for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Where Hinton and Bengio are AI cynics, Ng is an optimist. Ng founded Google’s influential AI project Google Brain in 2011 and went on to lead AI development Chinese tech company Baidu. Ng was appointed to Amazon’s board of directors this year as the tech giant makes massive investments in the technology. He currently leads a fund that invests in AI startups.
Suleyman co-founded two influential AI startups, DeepMind and Inflection. DeepMind was acquired by Google, and Inflection’s staff, including Suleyman, was poached by Microsoft. Suleyman is now the CEO of Microsoft AI, leading research and development for its AI tools. He’s faced controversy in the past over allegations that he bullied DeepMind staffers.
Delangue is the CEO of Hugging Face, a startup that’s worked to democratize AI by developing open-source natural language processing (NLP) technologies.
“We need more companies and organizations to share their models and datasets publicly and in open-source so that everyone can understand and build AI themselves,” Delangue told Quartz in 2023.
Hassabis, the CEO of Google Deepmind, is working to make AI tools that could one day develop drugs from antibiotics to cancer treatments. Under Hassabis, Google Deepmind also debuted Google’s chatbot Gemini, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that’s been used by major businesses such as Goldman Sachs and Mercedes Benz.
