Artificial Intelligence is a rapidly growing field, and even more so in the past few years. And just like any other field, Artificial Intelligence also has influential people- people that other people want to listen to, and follow. In this blog post, I will talk about the 5 most influential people in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Elon Musk
The billionaire entrepreneur, who some time back was also the wealthiest individual on the planet is known for founding and managing various companies working on the cutting edge of technology such as SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Elon Musk has been very vocal about Artificial Intelligence, and the opportunities and the threats it brings along with it for a long-long time. He recognized the double-edged sword that Artificial Intelligence is and frequently sounds alarm to regulate it. Elon Musk very well understand the implications of generally intelligent and super intelligent AI. He was even one of the first investors for DeepMind, a AI research company that has been in the limelight recently for the advances they have brought in AI.
Being in the driver seat of Tesla(pun intended), a company that heavily relies on AI and co-founder of OpenAI, a not-profit AI research company while having 58.8 million followers on Twitter, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Elon Musk is the first person on this list. Elon Musk’s influence in the field of Artificial Intelligence in unparalled.
Demis Hassabis
Demis Hassabis is the co-founder and current CEO of DeepMind. DeepMind first came into limelight when its software AlphaGo defeated the human champion of the game Go, Lee Sedol in 4 out of 5 matches back in 2016. The game was though to be unsolvable by Artificial Intelligence for at least another decade and it is for this reason that everyone is still in awe of their achievement. Quite recently, DeepMind was in the news again, but this time the reason was AlphaFold- a software solving the 50 year old problem in biology and mathematics, the protein folding problem.
DeepMind was founded in 2010 with a single minded focus of building Artificial General Intelligence which hasn’t moved an inch till date. And such was there resolve and capability to to do it, that they were able to raise funding from investors like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel among others. The company was later acquired by by Google in 2014, and is now a subsidiary of Alphabet.
With the achievements that DeepMind has had, Demis Hassabis being the CEO, and a co-founder while also being the UK Government’s AI Advisor since 2018, exerts a massive influence in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Twitter: @demishassabis
Andrew Ng
If you are one of those who got into the field of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, it is almost impossible that you did not study an online course by Andrew Ng. Andrew Ng is a professor at Stanford University. He was a co-founder and head of Google Brain and a former Chief Scientist at Baidu. Andrew Ng is on a mission to democratize Artificial Intelligence by teaching these skills to the masses. He founded Coursera, and DeepLearning.ai to achieve his goal, and has taught over 2.5 million students the skills related to Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, he launched and heads the AI fund which backs startups in the field of Artificial Intelligence while also being a co-founder of Landing AI.
He is an Artificial Intelligence popularizer and has delivered many talks at the world’s top-notch colleges and industry-leading tech companies. Along with his MOOCs(Massive Online Open Courses), he has also written many articles, books, and frequently holds webinars.
With well over 600k followers on Twitter and his massive influence on the students he has helped over many years, he holds a position in the world of Artificial Intelligence that no one else can even contend for and his popularity is second to none. His influence was even recognized by Time magazine when he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012.
Twitter: @AndrewYNg
Yann LeCun
Yann Lecun is no stranger in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He is the godfather of Deep Learning and the founding father of Convolutional Neural Networks. LeCun has received many awards and honors, including the Turing Award in 2018 along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Currently, he is a professor at New York University and also the Chief AI Scientist at Facebook. Previously, he has also held other prestigious positions such as being the founding director of NYU Center for Data Science and being the first director of Facebook AI Research, New York.
He is an active researcher in the field of Computer Vision and Self Supervised Learning, a hot topic in research nowadays. He is one of the most-followed people in AI research.
Twitter: @ylecun
Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman is an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and Machine Learning at MIT. However, his fame mostly comes from his podcast- The Lex Fridman podcast. He is known for having deep conversations on his podcast with his guests on a wide variety of topics from Alien Life to reversing aging to morality. However, the podcast is mostly focused on Artificial Intelligence and is one of the most listened-to podcasts in the field even though AI is the exclusive focus of the podcast. With so many listeners listening to him for hours at a time and having well over 700k followers on Twitter, he definitely is one of the most influential figures in the world of Artificial Intelligence.
Twitter: @lexfridman
Make sure to check out my other blog post on- 11 Twitter Accounts to follow the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence, click here.