“we stand on the shoulders of Giants…
I present to you: the AI Gods”
Personal AI Heroes:
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 questions — TED.talk
— Professor, MIT; Founder, Inst. for the Future of Life
John Carmack — quicklinks — wikipedia
— founder of ID, co-creator of DOOM, ex-CTO of Oculus
Elon Musk — quotes — concerns — wikipedia — @elonmusk
— CEO: Tesla, SpaceX
Anatoly Dneprov — the Game — Crabs 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