Ian Buck

American computer scientist who developed BrookGPU at Stanford — an early attempt at using GPUs for general computation — and was recruited by Jensen Huang to lead the development of CUDA, the programming framework that made Nvidia GPUs programmable for applications beyond graphics.

Created CUDA as Nvidia's general-purpose GPU computing platform — the software layer that allowed researchers and engineers to program Nvidia GPUs for any parallel computation — which became the switching cost that locked the AI research community into Nvidia hardware.