AI Gods: The Pantheon : Who’s Who in AI 2023

Pantheon: the AI Gods

“we stand on the shoulders of Giants…
I present to you: the AI Gods”


Personal AI Heroes:

Sam Harris — TED.talk

Ilya Sutskever — prime directive: love —  wikipedia@ilyasut
— Scientist, Co-Founder, OpenAI
— who may also go down in history as the Brutus to Altman’s Caesar…

Max Tegmark — most important questionsTED.talk
— Professor, MIT; Founder, Inst. for the Future of Life

John Carmackquicklinks — wikipedia
— founder of ID, co-creator of DOOM, ex-CTO of Oculus

Elon Musk — quotesconcernswikipedia@elonmusk
— CEO: Tesla, SpaceX

Anatoly Dneprovthe GameCrabs on the Island
— Russian physicist, Sci-Fi author


New Kids on the AI Block[chain]:

Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI

Nick Bostrøm — TED.talk

Demis Hassabis — CEO, DeepMind

Larry Page — CEO, Alphabet / Google

Stuart Russell — wrote the textbook that every AI coder reads

Sebastian Thrun — TED.talk
— father of self-driving cars — Founder, Udemy

and yes, I am intentionally putting at the bottom of the AI Gods list:

Yann Lecun — made famous by his groundbreaking work on ImageNet, which most see as the breakthrough which ushered in the present age of Deep Learning. He is now head of AI for Meta (Facebook), which is about as evil a company as can be (Amazon being a worthy contender for that title) twitter: @ylecun

and last but not least, our beloved Gadfly of the AI Gods:

Gary Marcus — the critic whose ego is as big as LeCun’s. He loves to hear himself talk. Beyond his hubris, he makes some extremely valid points. Gary is the shining knight fighting the battle against ignorant hype which equates LLMs c.2022 with AGI (see AI Vocabulary for full clarification of these and many other terms). You can read Marcus for yourself on both his constant twitter @garymarcus and more poignantly on his substack: “The Road to AI We Can Trust”


Elders / Forefathers: the Primordial AI Gods:

Chomsky, Noam — perspective on AI, c. Dec 2022

Hillis, Danny

Joy, Bill

Kurzweil, Ray

McCarthy, John

Minsky, Marvin

Moravec, Hans


Our Ancient AI Ancestors:

Bush, Vannevar — quicklinks

Good, Irving John — quote

Turing, Alan

Babbage, Charles — The Difference Engine