Who is behind the modern AI movement

While artificial intelligence has hogged the spotlight over the past year, technology that can appear to work like human brains has been at the forefront of researchers, investors and technology 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.

Sam Altman

Mr. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab that made the ChatGPT chatbot that has gone viral over the past year and led to recognition of the power of generative AI. Mr. Altman helped found OpenAI after meeting Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman was running Y Combinator, a startup incubator in Silicon Valley.

Dario Amodei

Mr. Amodei, an AI researcher who joined OpenAI early on, runs the AI ​​startup Anthropic. A former Google researcher, he helped set the direction of OpenAI research but left in 2021 after disagreements over the path the company was taking. That year, he founded Anthropic, a company dedicated to creating safe artificial intelligence systems.

Bill Gates

Mr. Gates, The founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, has long been a skeptic about the power of artificial intelligence. Then in August 2022, he got a demo of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the underlying AI model for ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an AI convert. His endorsement has helped Microsoft move aggressively to leverage generative AI

Demis Hassabis

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

Geoffrey Hinton

Mr. Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, and two graduate students were responsible for neural networks, a fundamental underlying technology in this wave of neural networks for artificial intelligence that has taken over the technology industry, and Google soon agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his partners. The crew raised $44 million in 2012 to bring them in, beating out Microsoft and Baidu, the Chinese technology company.

Reed Hoffman

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

Elon Musk

Mr. Musk, who leads Tesla and founded SpaceX, He helped found OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about the potential risks of artificial intelligence. At the time, he sought to position OpenAI, a non-profit organization, as a more ethical counterweight to other technology companies. Mr. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr. Altman.

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. Since then, Microsoft has gone all-in on AI, integrating OpenAI technology into its Bing search engine and across many of its other products.

Page I see

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

Peter Thiel

Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist, made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook and was a major investor in early artificial intelligence labs. He poured money into DeepMind, and later into OpenAI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Mr. Yudkowsky, an Internet philosopher and self-taught AI researcher, has helped seed much philosophical thinking about technology. He was a leader in a community that called themselves rationalists, or in later years, instrumentalists, who believed in the power of artificial intelligence but were also concerned that the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowski hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on artificial intelligence, where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and gained his support for DeepMind.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been pushing for artificial intelligence for at least a decade. Realizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind, before Google made the winning bid. He then went on a recruiting campaign to bring AI talent to Facebook.

He contributed to the preparation of the reports Kid Metz, Karen Wise, Nico Grant And Mike Isaac.