38 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Ukrainian-Canadian computer scientist and PhD student of Geoffrey Hinton, who as first author of the AlexNet paper in 2012 demonstrated that deep convolutional networks trained on GPUs could dramatically outperform all other approaches on the ImageNet benchmark.
The 2017 paper by Vaswani, Shazeer, Uszkoreit, and five other Google Brain researchers introducing the Transformer architecture — replacing recurrent networks with self-attention — which became the foundation for GPT, BERT, and all subsequent large language models.
American product executive who led Google's VR and AR efforts (Google Cardboard, Daydream, Google Glass) and later co-founded Sierra — an AI-powered customer service platform.
French entrepreneur and co-founder/CEO of Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform that hosts tens of thousands of machine learning models and datasets — the GitHub of AI.
Chilean entrepreneur and co-founder/CEO of Runway, the generative AI video and image company whose tools have been used in Academy Award-winning films and by millions of creators.
American cognitive scientist who co-developed the backpropagation algorithm and the parallel distributed processing (PDP) framework — the foundation of modern deep learning.
Israeli-British logician who has contributed to modal logic, temporal logic, labelled deductive systems, and is the editor of the most comprehensive reference work in philosophical logic.
Cade Metz's 2021 narrative history of the deep learning revolution, centering on the researchers — Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, Sutskever — who kept neural network research alive and then rode it to transform the industry.
British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, Nobel Prize laureate (2024), and the researcher most responsible for keeping neural network research alive during decades of academic skepticism — whose students and ideas now dominate AI.
British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist who is the 'godfather of deep learning' — developing backpropagation, deep belief networks, capsule networks, and other foundational techniques that enabled modern AI.
American multinational technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, dominant in internet search and online advertising, and a major force in artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
Dutch computer scientist and logician who has worked on formal models of argumentation, defeasible reasoning, and the logic of legal argumentation.
German computer scientist and Google Brain researcher, co-author of 'Attention Is All You Need', who proposed the core insight that attention mechanisms alone could replace recurrent networks entirely.
American cognitive scientist who co-authored Parallel Distributed Processing with Rumelhart and has contributed to connectionist models of language acquisition and memory.
American logician and philosopher who extended the stit theory of agency to deontic logic, developing a formal theory of obligation based on agency in branching time, and contributed to the logic of defaults and reasons.
American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence' (1955), organized the Dartmouth Workshop (1956) that launched AI as a research field, invented the Lisp programming language (1958), and developed the concept of time-sharing computing.
American philosopher who developed a comprehensive account of defeasible reasoning and built OSCAR — an AI system that reasons in accordance with philosophical epistemology.
American cognitive psychologist who developed ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational) — a cognitive architecture that has been the most influential computational model of human cognition for over four decades.
Dutch computer scientist who has worked on deontic logic and its applications to artificial intelligence, particularly normative multi-agent systems.
Portuguese logician who has worked on contrary-to-duty obligations, deontic logic, and normative reasoning in AI.
American philosopher who has worked on the Turing test, strong AI, and the philosophy of computation.
Dutch computer scientist who has worked on deontic logic and normative reasoning in artificial intelligence.
British computer scientist at Imperial College who has worked on the logical representation of normative systems, deontic logic, and their applications to AI and law.
CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor — the AI-powered code editor that became the fastest-growing developer tool in 2024 by integrating large language models directly into the coding environment.
British AI entrepreneur and co-founder of DeepMind who later founded Inflection AI and then became CEO of Microsoft AI, overseeing consumer-facing AI products including Copilot.
Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Alberta, co-author of the seminal Reinforcement Learning textbook with Andrew Barto, and author of 'The Bitter Lesson' essay.
Australian-American AI researcher and robotics pioneer who argued that intelligence is not about central symbolic representation but about embodied, reactive behaviors — the subsumption architecture.
American cognitive scientist and AI researcher who developed conceptual dependency theory and the notion of scripts — stereotyped event sequences stored in memory that enable natural language understanding.
American computer scientist who co-developed the backpropagation algorithm and developed the REINFORCE algorithm — the foundation of policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning.
Roger Schank and Robert Abelson's AI system that uses structured stereotypical knowledge (scripts) to understand narratives — filling in implicit information from a script for 'going to a restaurant.'
AI customer service platform co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, providing enterprise-grade conversational AI agents for customer interactions.
Parmy Olson's 2023 book covering the race between Google DeepMind and OpenAI for AI dominance — focusing on Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman — and the corporate and scientific rivalries that defined the early LLM era.
American computer scientist and Stanford professor, Larry Page's doctoral advisor, best known for his 1971 SHRDLU natural language program and his later work on human-computer interaction design.
Rich Sutton's 2019 essay arguing that the history of AI research consistently shows that general methods leveraging massive computation outperform methods that incorporate human domain knowledge — the 'bitter lesson' being that AI researchers keep re-learning this.
Lex Fridman's long-form interview podcast featuring scientists, engineers, philosophers, athletes, and public figures in conversations typically running 3–8 hours.
A formal mathematical theory of intelligence as the ability to achieve goals across a wide range of environments — measured against the universal algorithmic prior.
French-American computer scientist, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, and co-recipient of the Turing Award (2018) with Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who invented convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and advocates for open-source AI.
Anthropic's family of large language models — AI assistants trained with a Constitutional AI approach emphasizing safety, helpfulness, and harmlessness.