Research history People

Mathematician Norbert Wiener is widely considered the founder of cybernetics, the study of regulatory systems. His 1948 book Cybernetics treated feedback formally and framed control and communication as one problem for animals and machines.

Alan Turing (1912–1954) was a British mathematician whose 1936 paper defined computation with an abstract machine. His 1950 paper proposed the imitation game, now called the Turing test, and he is counted among the founders of artificial intelligence.

American mathematician and electrical engineer whose 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" gave communication engineering a mathematical foundation.

John McCarthy (1927–2011) was an American computer scientist. His 1955 proposal is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence”, he organised the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, and he created the LISP programming language.

Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist born in London whose research on neural networks, including back-propagation and deep convolutional networks, is central to deep learning. He shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Marc Raibert (born 1949) is a robotics researcher who built the first self-balancing hopping robots, founded Boston Dynamics, and is now executive director of the Boston Dynamics AI Institute.

Yann LeCun is a French computer scientist known for convolutional neural networks, which learn to recognise images directly from pixels. He co-authored the 1998 paper that introduced LeNet-5 and shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Canadian computer scientist whose work on sequence models, word embeddings and attention helped lay foundations for modern language models. He shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

Dario Amodei is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. He previously worked at OpenAI, where he was Vice President of Research and co-authored the GPT-2 paper and led the research for GPT-3.

Israeli-Canadian computer scientist born in 1986 who co-built AlexNet, co-founded OpenAI and served as its chief scientist, and later founded Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a computer scientist born in Shanghai who won the 2000 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, and later founded Tsinghua University's Yao Class and IIIS.

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) was a political scientist, psychologist and computer scientist who, with Allen Newell and J. C. Shaw, built the first successful AI program and later received the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Berlin-born American computer scientist who wrote ELIZA, an early program that held a written conversation with a user, and later published an influential critique of artificial intelligence.

American computer scientist and psychologist who, with Herbert A. Simon and J. C. Shaw, built the first list-processing language and the earliest heuristic problem-solving programs, treating thought as computation.

Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) was an American scientist who co-founded MIT’s AI laboratory and co-signed the 1955 Dartmouth proposal. With Seymour Papert he wrote the 1969 book Perceptrons, which analysed the limits of simple neural networks.

Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) was an American psychologist who developed the perceptron, an early learning machine that adjusted its weights from examples. His Mark I Perceptron is now held by the Smithsonian Institution.

American physicist born in 1933 who invented the Hopfield network in 1982, a model that stores and recalls patterns using ideas from spin physics, and who received half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Edward Feigenbaum (born 1936) is known as the father of expert systems. His projects produced DENDRAL, META-DENDRAL, MYCIN and ONCOCIN, he pioneered the term "knowledge engineering", and he shared the 1994 ACM Turing Award.

Judea Pearl is a computer scientist and statistician who invented Bayesian networks and their main inference algorithms, and later built a mathematical framework for causal inference from data. He received the 2011 ACM Turing Award.

David Rumelhart (1942–2011) was an American cognitive psychologist. His 1986 work with colleagues helped bring back-propagation and neural-network models to a wide audience.

Rodney Brooks (born 1954) is an Australian-born roboticist who promoted behaviour-based robotics and the subsumption architecture, directed MIT's AI Laboratory and CSAIL, and co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI.

Taiwan-born computer scientist and executive who built research labs at Microsoft and Google in China, co-founded Sinovation Ventures, wrote widely read books on AI, and founded the foundation-model company 01.AI.

Protein scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, known for computational protein design: he designed a protein unlike any in nature in 2003 and received one half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

German computer scientist and co-author, with Sepp Hochreiter, of the 1997 LSTM paper. He has directed the Swiss AI lab IDSIA since 1995 and has publicly argued that some contributions to AI deserve more credit.

German computer scientist who co-developed the long short-term memory (LSTM) network, a recurrent neural network design for learning from sequences such as text and speech. He led the xLSTM work in 2024.

American computer scientist known for Google's core infrastructure — MapReduce, Bigtable and Spanner — and for leading work on Google Brain, TensorFlow and, from 2023, the role of Google's chief scientist.

Zhou Zhihua is a Chinese computer scientist at Nanjing University who works on ensemble learning, weakly supervised learning and multi-label learning. He founded the LAMDA institute there, serves as a university vice president, and was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2025.

British computer scientist born in 1976 who specialises in reinforcement learning. He led DeepMind's AlphaGo project, co-authored the 2013 deep Q-network paper and later founded Ineffable Intelligence.

Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet, the large-scale image dataset and challenge that gave data-driven computer vision a common benchmark, and has led AI research in both academia and industry.

Demis Hassabis is a British AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind and was the last author of the 2016 AlphaGo paper. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on predicting protein structures.

Czech computer scientist and lead author of word2vec, the 2013 methods that learn word vectors from text. His later work includes the fastText library and research on mathematical models that grow in complexity.

American scientist (born 1985) who worked on AlphaFold at Google DeepMind and shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Demis Hassabis for protein structure prediction.

Brett Adcock is a founder of several technology companies, including the recruiting platform Vettery, the electric aircraft maker Archer Aviation and the humanoid robotics company Figure AI, where he is chief executive.

American AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI, led its reinforcement-learning team and helped develop the training methods behind ChatGPT; he later moved to Anthropic and then became chief scientist of Thinking Machines Lab.

Chelsea Finn is a computer scientist and assistant professor at Stanford University whose research spans meta-learning, deep reinforcement learning and robot learning; she is a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

Chris Olah is a Canadian machine learning researcher and co-founder of Anthropic, known for work on mechanistic interpretability, the effort to understand the internal workings of neural networks.

Jan Leike is an AI alignment researcher who joined Anthropic in May 2024 after leaving OpenAI, where he had co-led the superalignment project with Ilya Sutskever.

Jared Kaplan is a physicist turned AI researcher who co-founded Anthropic and serves as its Chief Science Officer. He was first author of the 2020 paper “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.”

Alec Radford is a machine learning researcher who worked at OpenAI from 2016 to 2024. He was first author of the GPT-2, CLIP and Whisper papers, and lead author of the 2018 paper that introduced the GPT approach.

Noam Shazeer is an AI researcher who co-wrote the Transformer paper and was first author of the paper on sparsely gated mixture-of-experts layers. He co-founded Character.AI, returned to Google in 2024, and announced a move to OpenAI in 2026.

Ashish Vaswani is a computer scientist best known as the first-listed author of “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. He also co-founded the AI companies Adept and Essential AI.

Kaiming He is a computer-vision and deep-learning researcher, first author of the 2015 ResNet paper that introduced residual connections, now a tenured associate professor at MIT.

Aidan Gomez is a Canadian computer scientist, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, and one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture.

Andrew G. Barto is a computer scientist who helped establish reinforcement learning as a general framework and shared the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Richard Sutton.

Richard Sutton is a computer scientist at the University of Alberta known for his work on reinforcement learning; he co-authored the field's standard textbook and shared the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Andrew Barto.

Raj Reddy is an Indian-born computer scientist who built the first system capable of continuous speech recognition and led major computing institutions at Carnegie Mellon University. He shared the 1994 ACM Turing Award with Ed Feigenbaum.

Sergey Levine is a computer scientist who studies how robots can learn control behaviour from data. He is a professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of Physical Intelligence.

American electrical engineer who built one of the first checkers-playing programs and, in a 1959 paper, helped name the field now called machine learning.

Koray Kavukcuoglu is a DeepMind computer scientist who co-authored the first deep Q-network paper and later, as Google DeepMind's CTO and Google's chief AI architect, fronted successive Gemini model launches.

Durk Kingma is a machine learning researcher and co-author of the variational autoencoder and the Adam optimizer; he has worked at OpenAI, Google Brain / DeepMind and Anthropic.

Ian Goodfellow is a machine learning researcher and first author of the 2014 paper that introduced generative adversarial networks, which train a generator and a discriminator against each other. He has worked at OpenAI, Google Brain, Apple and Google DeepMind.

Quoc Le is a machine-learning researcher whose 2013 Stanford Ph.D. thesis was on scalable feature learning. He co-authored papers on large-scale unsupervised learning, sequence-to-sequence models, neural architecture search and EfficientNet; the sequence-to-sequence paper won a NeurIPS 2024 Test of Time award.

Niki Parmar is one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, and is named in Google's own account of that work.

Llion Jones is one of the eight authors of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" and a co-founder and CTO of Sakana AI.

Illia Polosukhin is one of the eight authors of the 2017 Transformer paper and a co-founder of NEAR Protocol. A 2024 NEAR post identifies him as CEO of the NEAR Foundation.[^1][^3][^6]

Harry Shum is a computer scientist who spent most of his career at Microsoft, helping found Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing and later leading the company's AI and Research group. He is an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow recognised for computer vision and graphics.

Wang Jian is the founder of Alibaba Cloud and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was previously a Zhejiang University psychology professor and Microsoft Research Asia executive, and directs Zhijiang Laboratory.

Stanford computer science professor who directs the Center for Research on Foundation Models and works on making language models more open and more rigorously benchmarked.

Christopher Manning is a Stanford professor of linguistics and computer science, former SAIL director, and former ACL president, recognized with fellowships and academy memberships.

Pieter Abbeel is a UC Berkeley professor who directs the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-directs BAIR; his honors include the ACM Prize in Computing and IEEE Fellow status.

Noam Brown is an AI researcher at OpenAI, listed on his homepage as working on reasoning, reinforcement learning, self-play and multi-agent AI. He is known for the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and for work on CICERO and reasoning models such as OpenAI o1.

Zhang Bo (born 1935) is a scholar in automatic control and artificial intelligence. He studied and taught at Tsinghua University and helped found the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems.

Yoav Shoham is an Israeli-American computer scientist, professor emeritus at Stanford and co-founder and chairman of AI21 Labs. He initiated the AI Index and has worked on AI, game theory and multi-agent systems.

Tang Xiaoou (1968–2023) was a Chinese computer vision researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and co-founder and chairman of SenseTime, one of China's best-known AI companies.

Ali Farhadi (born 1982) is a computer scientist and professor at the University of Washington who served as chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI from 2023 to 2026, a period that included fully open releases of the OLMo, Molmo and Tülu models.

Spanish computer scientist (born 1983) who co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning, led DeepMind's AlphaStar research group, and became a technical lead on Gemini before leaving to start Discovery Loop.

Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist who co-founded OpenAI in 2015. He later led teams working on GPT models, GitHub Copilot and Codex.

Shane Legg is a New Zealand AI researcher and co-founder of DeepMind, known for helping popularise the term "artificial general intelligence" and for leading the company's AGI safety work.

Xiaodong He is a JD.com vice president, deputy managing director of JD AI Research, and an IEEE Fellow. He works on conversational AI, including question answering, emotion detection, and public-service hotlines.

Zhiyuan Liu is a tenured associate professor at Tsinghua University and co-founder and chief scientist of Beijing ModelBest, a company working to run capable large models on local devices.

AI researcher and research administrator who worked at IBM's Watson Group and at JD.com, and has been director and chief scientist of the Shanghai AI Laboratory since April 2024.

Ziv Aviram is a co-founder of Mobileye, the company he helped build from its founding in 1999 through its 2014 New York Stock Exchange listing and its 2017 acquisition by Intel.

Jack Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, where he has led policy and later public-benefit work and, from March 2026, the Anthropic Institute. He is also a co-author of the GPT-3 paper.

Tang Jie is a Chinese computer scientist listed as a founder of Zhipu AI and its chief scientist, and a Tsinghua professor who created the AMiner academic database and co-authored the GLM pretraining work behind Zhipu's models.

Sun Jian was a computer-vision scientist who spent 13 years at Microsoft, co-created ResNet, and later became chief scientist at Megvii. He died aged 45 after a sudden illness in June 2022.

Shun-ichi Amari (born 1936) is a Japanese mathematical engineer who founded information geometry and built theoretical foundations for machine learning and neural networks; he received the 2025 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology.

Chris Urmson is co-founder and chief executive officer of Aurora, the self-driving company he leads. Under him Aurora announced the acquisition of Uber's self-driving unit and put driverless commercial trucks on public roads.

Zhang Yaqin is an electrical engineer and technology executive who spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, served as president of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and joined Tsinghua University in 2019 as a chair professor of intelligent science.

Sam McCandlish is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Anthropic, a co-author of influential work on scaling laws and GPT-3, and the company's first Responsible Scaling Officer.

Kyle Vogt is identified in General Motors' March 2016 announcement as the founder of Cruise Automation, the San Francisco startup GM acquired; the company he founded later ran driverless passenger service in San Francisco until California regulators suspended its permits in October 2023.

Zhu Songchun is a computer vision researcher who worked at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2002 and was named in 2020 to lead Peking University's Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Tom Brown is an AI researcher listed among the co-founders of Anthropic and the first author of the 2020 paper that introduced GPT-3, one of the most widely cited demonstrations of few-shot learning in large language models.

First author of the latent diffusion paper that underlies Stable Diffusion, and later co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs, the company behind the FLUX image models.

Andreas Blattmann is a researcher on generative image models, second author of the latent diffusion paper behind Stable Diffusion, co-author of the Stable Diffusion 3 paper, and a 2024 co-founder of Black Forest Labs, which released the FLUX.1 models.

Patrick Esser is a researcher on generative image and video models: a co-author of the latent diffusion paper that became the basis of Stable Diffusion, lead author of the Stable Diffusion 3 paper, and a 2024 co-founder of Black Forest Labs.

Wang Haifeng is Baidu's chief technology officer, an ACL and IEEE Fellow, and the first-listed author of the ERNIE technical reports behind the company's foundation models.

Jacob Devlin is a research scientist and first author of BERT, a language model Google introduced in 2018 that reads text in both directions. He earlier worked on neural machine translation at Microsoft Research.