The who’s who behind the modern artificial intelligence movement

From Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg, here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern AI movement who have influenced the technology’s development.

AI most important people | Modern AI development

Here's a quick look at some of the most important people who have contributed to development of modern AI. (Zuckerberg: Jason Henry/The New York Times; Altman: Jim Wilson/The New York Times; Musk: Amir Hamja/The New York Times)

Written by J. Edward Moreno

While artificial intelligence has taken the limelight over the past year, technology that can appear to operate like human brains has been top of mind for researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.

Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern AI movement who have influenced the technology’s development.

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Sam Altman

Altman is CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab that made the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral over the past year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Altman helped start OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Altman ran Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup incubator.

Dario Amodei

Amodei, an AI researcher who joined OpenAI early on, runs AI startup Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped set OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements about the path the company was taking. That year, he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating safe AI systems.

Bill Gates

Gates, a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical of how powerful AI could become. Then in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the AI model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Gates became an AI convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative AI.

Demis Hassabis

Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is the founder of DeepMind, one of the most important labs of this wave of AI. He secured financial backing to create DeepMind from investor Peter Thiel and built a lab that produced AlphaGo, an AI software that shocked the world in 2016 when it beat the world’s best player on the board game Go. (Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought DeepMind, which is based in Britain, in 2014, and Hassabis is one of the company’s top AI executives.

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Geoffrey Hinton

A professor at the University of Toronto, Hinton and two of his graduate students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of AI. Neural networks captivated the tech industry, and Google quickly agreed to pay Hinton and his crew $44 million in 2012 to bring them on, beating out Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese tech company.

Reid Hoffman

Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Musk and Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.

Elon Musk

Musk, who leads Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped establish OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about AI’s potential dangers. At the time, he sought to position OpenAI, a nonprofit, as a more ethical counterweight to other tech companies. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Altman.

Satya Nadella

Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, spearheaded the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the startup over that period. Microsoft has since gone whole hog on AI, incorporating OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine and across many of its other products.

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Larry Page

Page, who founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of AI and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Page has a more optimistic view of AI than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will live harmoniously one day.

Peter Thiel

Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a key investor in early AI labs. He poured money into DeepMind and, later, OpenAI.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Yudkowsky, an internet philosopher and self-taught AI researcher, helped seed much of the philosophical thinking around the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves Rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of AI but also worried the technology could destroy people. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Thiel) on AI, where Hassabis met Thiel and secured his backing for DeepMind.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has pushed for AI for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind, before Google made the winning bid. He then went on a hiring spree to bring aboard AI talent to Facebook.