The who’s who behind the modern artificial intelligence movement

Tech & Gadgets

While artificial intelligence has been in the spotlight for the past year, technology that can appear to work like human brains has been top-of-mind among researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.

Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern AI movement and who influenced the development of the technology.

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Sam Altman

Mr. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab that created the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral last year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped found OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman led Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator.

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Dario Amodei

Mr. Amodei, an AI researcher who joined OpenAI early, runs the AI start-up Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped shape OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements over the company’s path. That year he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating secure AI systems.

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Bill Gates

Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical about how powerful AI could become. Then, in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the AI model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an AI convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative AI

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Demis Hassabis

Mr Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is the founder of DeepMind, one of the most important laboratories of this wave of AI. He received financial backing to create DeepMind from investor Peter Thiel and built a laboratory that produced AlphaGo, an AI software that shocked the world. world in 2016 when it defeated the world’s best player of the board game Go. (Mr. Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought Britain-based DeepMind in 2014, and Mr. Hassabis is one of the company’s top AI managers.

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Geoffrey Hinton

A professor at the University of Toronto, Mr. Hinton, and two of his students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of AI. Neural networks fascinated the technology industry, and Google soon agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his colleagues. crew of $44 million in 2012 to attract them, beating Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese technology company.

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Reid Hoffman

Mr. Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.

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Elon Musk

Mr. Musk, who runs Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped found OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about the potential dangers of AI. At the time, he was trying to position OpenAI, a nonprofit organization, as a more ethical counterbalance to other tech companies. Mr Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr Altman.

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Satya Nadella

Mr. Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, led the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the startup during that period. Microsoft has since been in the thick of AI, incorporating OpenAI’s technology into the Bing search engine and many of its other products.

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Larry Page

Mr. Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of AI and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page has a more optimistic view of AI than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will one day live harmoniously.

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Peter Thiel

Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a major investor in the early AI labs. He invested money in DeepMind and later in OpenAI.

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Eliezer Joedkowski

Mr. Yudkowsky, an Internet philosopher and self-taught AI researcher, has helped create much of the philosophical thinking surrounding the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of AI but also feared that the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on AI, where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and assured his support for DeepMind.

Credit…Loren Elliott for The New York Times

Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been pushing for AI for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind before Google made the winning bid. He then started looking for people to bring AI talent to Facebook.

Reporting was contributed by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant And Mike Isaac.