Biggest names in AI

Business / By / September 2, 2023
  • Andrew Ng is a prominent AI researcher with a long list of accomplishments. Aside from founding Coursera and serving as an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Ng is also the founder of DeepLearning.ai and SaaS company Landing AI.
  • Andrej Karpathy is a computer scientist who once worked as director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. Karpathy earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2015 under the instruction of Fei-Fei Li and is also a founding member of OpenAI.
  • Along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton is considered one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence for his pioneering work on artificial neural nets. The trio won the 2018 Turing Award for their contributions.

The AI industry continues to advance at a rate scarcely believed possible a few years back. Numerous research papers are uploaded to the open-source arXiv repository each day which comprise the contributions of numerous scientists, engineers, and other great thinkers.

Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng is a prominent AI researcher with a long list of accomplishments. Aside from founding Coursera and serving as an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Ng is also the founder of DeepLearning.ai – a company that wants to grow and connect the global AI community with education, training, and community.

Ng also started the AI-powered SaaS solution company Landing AI and was also one of the co-founders of the Google Brain project.

Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist who is best known for enabling rapid advances in computer vision with the ImageNet dataset. Li works at Stanford University where she was formerly Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). 

In 2017 and 2018, Li took a sabbatical from Stanford and worked as Chief Scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud. At present, she serves as Co-Director of Stanford’s Institute of Human-Centered AI (HAI).

Cassie Kozyrkov 

According to her LinkedIn profile, Google Chief Data Scientist Cassie Kozyrkov has a mission “to democratize Decision Intelligence and safe, reliable AI.” 

Kozyrkov is also a keynote speaker who designed Google’s analytics program and has trained over 20,000 of her counterparts in decision-making, statistics, and machine learning.

Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist who once worked as director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. Karpathy, who earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 2015 under the instruction of Fei-Fei Li, is also a founding member of OpenAI.

Karpathy later returned to Stanford as the author and main lecturer for the university’s first deep learning course. In 2020, MIT Technology Review named him one of the world’s top innovators under 35. 

Demis Hassabis

Demis Hassabis is a British AI entrepreneur and researcher who is the founder and current CEO of Google AI subsidiaries DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. Hassabis also became an adviser to the British Government’s new Office for Artificial Intelligence in 2020.

One of Hassabis’s crowning achievements is the co-development of AlphaGo, an ML program that defeated a human opponent in the Chinese board game Go. 

Hassabis, who received a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, is called the “superhero” of AI because of his ability to advance the industry and develop new algorithms inspired by the human brain.

Geoffrey Hinton

While Hassabis is the superhero of AI, cognitive and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton is part of a trio that is sometimes referred to as the “Godfathers of AI” and “Godfathers of Deep Learning”.  In 2018, the trio comprised of Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun won the $1 million Turing Award for their work enabling computers to learn like humans.

Hinton is a prominent identity in the AI industry and has split his time working at Google Brain and the University of Toronto since 2013. Over that time, he has authored or co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications mostly related to artificial neural nets.

Key Highlights

  • Andrew Ng:
    • Andrew Ng is a prominent AI researcher known for founding Coursera and serving as an adjunct professor at Stanford University.
    • He founded DeepLearning.ai, which focuses on connecting the global AI community through education, training, and community.
    • Ng also started Landing AI, an AI-powered SaaS solution company, and was a co-founder of the Google Brain project.
  • Fei-Fei Li:
    • Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist known for her contributions to computer vision using the ImageNet dataset.
    • She worked at Stanford University as the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL).
    • Li served as Chief Scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud and is currently Co-Director of Stanford’s Institute of Human-Centered AI (HAI).
  • Cassie Kozyrkov:
    • Cassie Kozyrkov is the Chief Data Scientist at Google, focusing on democratizing Decision Intelligence and AI.
    • She designed Google’s analytics program and has trained thousands of counterparts in decision-making, statistics, and machine learning.
  • Andrej Karpathy:
    • Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist, previously worked at Tesla as director of AI and Autopilot Vision.
    • He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University under Fei-Fei Li and is a founding member of OpenAI.
    • Karpathy returned to Stanford to teach deep learning and was recognized by MIT Technology Review as a top innovator under 35.
  • Demis Hassabis:
    • Demis Hassabis is the founder and CEO of Google AI subsidiaries DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs.
    • He co-developed AlphaGo, an ML program that defeated a human opponent in the board game Go.
    • Hassabis advised the British Government’s Office for Artificial Intelligence and is recognized for advancing the AI industry.
  • Geoffrey Hinton:
    • Geoffrey Hinton is a cognitive and computer scientist known as one of the “Godfathers of Deep Learning” along with Bengio and LeCun.
    • He worked at Google Brain and the University of Toronto, authored numerous publications on artificial neural nets.
    • Hinton, along with Bengio and LeCun, won the 2018 Turing Award for their contributions to AI.

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About The Author

Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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