While artificial intelligence has gained prominence in the past year, technology that works like the human brain has been on the minds of researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.
Here are some of the people involved in the emergence of the modern AI movement that influenced the development of technology.
Sam Altman
Mr. Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab that developed the chatbot ChatGPT, which went viral last year and recognized the potential of artificial intelligence. After meeting Elon Musk about the technology in 2015, Mr. Altman helped. At that time, Mr. Altman runs Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley start-up incubator.
Dario Amodi
An AI researcher who initially joined OpenAI, Mr. Amodei runs AI start-up Anthropic. A former Google researcher, he helped set OpenAI’s research direction, but left in 2021 after disagreements over the company’s direction. That year, he founded Anthropic, a company dedicated to building secure AI systems.
bill Gates
Mr. gates, The Microsoft founder, and for years the world’s richest man, has long been skeptical of how powerful AI will become. Later in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, an AI model based on ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates AI transformed. His approval helped Microsoft aggressively exploit AI
Temis Hasabis
Mr. Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is the founder of DeepMind, one of the most important labs of this AI wave, who received financial backing to build DeepMind from investor Peter Thiel and created the lab that developed the AI software AlphaGo. In 2016, Board Game Go won the World’s Best Player. (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 executives.
Geoffrey Hinton
University of Toronto Professor, Mr. Hinton and two of his graduate students took charge of neural networks, and this wave of AI neural networks captivated the tech industry, and Google soon hired Mr. Hinton and agreed to pay him. In 2012, it beat out Microsoft and Chinese tech giant Baidu, bringing the group $44 million.
Reid Hoffman
Former PayPal executive Mr. Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist—Mr. Musk and Mr. Along with Thiel, he was part of the team that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.
Elon Musk
Mr. who led Tesla and founded SpaceX. Musk, Helped establish OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about the potential dangers of AI. At the time, OpenAI, a nonprofit organization, sought to position itself as a more ethical counterweight to other tech companies. Mr. After disagreements with Altman, Mr. Musk left OpenAI in 2018.
Satya Nadella
Microsoft CEO Mr. Nadella led the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, giving the start-up $13 billion during that period as Microsoft incorporated OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine and many of its other products, making full use of AI.
Larry Page
Co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin, Mr. Page has long been a proponent of AI and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page is more optimistic about AI 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 who made most of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a major investor in early AI labs. He poured money into DeepMind and, later, OpenAI.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Mr. Yudkowsky, an Internet philosopher and self-taught AI researcher, helped seed much of the philosophical thinking surrounding the technology. He was the head of a community that called themselves rationalists, or later efficient altruists, and believed in the power of AI, but worried that the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yutkowski hosted the annual conference (sponsored by Mr. Thiel) on AI, where Mr. Hassabis Mr. Meet Thiel and get his support for Deep Mind.
Mark Zuckerberg
The chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Mr. Zuckerberg has been pushing for AI for at least a decade. Realizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind before Google made a successful bid. He was later hired to bring AI talent to Facebook.
Reporting contributed Kate Metz, Karen Weiss, Nico Grant And Mike Isaac.
