Curated playlist
Artificial intelligence people
- Jan LeikeIn May 2024, Jan Leike resigned from OpenAI, where he had led the company's work on AI alignment. Leike had built his career at some of the most prominent institutions in AI safety research. His reasons for leaving were stated plainly in a…
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman was in seventh grade when he became fixated on BattleBots. The television program featured combat between remote-controlled robots, and it set off what he described as his first experience of self-directed learning. He read…
- Elon MuskElon Reeve Musk sold a video game he wrote himself at age twelve for approximately $500. The game was called Blastar, built in BASIC, and sold to a magazine called PC and Office Technology. That small transaction points toward something…
- Daniela AmodeiDaniela Amodei enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz on a classical flute scholarship. She left with a Bachelor of Arts in English literature. Those facts sit in sharp contrast to how she is now known. She is the president…
- Yoshua BengioYoshua Bengio became, in November 2025, the first AI researcher to pass one million citations on Google Scholar. He was already the most-cited computer scientist in the world, ranked by both total citations and by h-index. He was also the…
- Yann LeCunYann LeCun was born on the 8th of July 1960 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, a suburb of Paris, and his surname carries the fingerprints of a culture older than France itself. Le Cun derives from the old Breton form Le Cunff, rooted in the…
- Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis was born Dimitrios Hassapis on the 27th of July 1976, and his very surname carries a story. The original name, Hassapis, means “butcher” in Greek. At some point he executed what one colleague described as “a point mutation”…
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia at age 30 in a Denny's restaurant booth in East San Jose, California, and has led the company every single day since the 5th of April 1993. That diner was not a random choice. Huang had worked the graveyard…
- Andrew NgAndrew Yan-Tak Ng was born in London on the 18th of April 1976, to a hematologist father and an arts administrator mother who had both immigrated from Hong Kong. Before he was a teenager, his family had already moved twice: first back to…
- Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton spent decades trying to convince the scientific world that the brain's approach to learning was the right model for machines. By the time the Nobel Committee called his name in 2024, he had already walked away from the most…
- Sam AltmanSam Altman got his first computer at age eight: an Apple Macintosh. Within a few years he was disassembling it to examine the hardware inside. That childhood instinct to open things up and understand how they work has since made Altman one…
- Dario AmodeiIn November 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI called Dario Amodei with an extraordinary offer. They wanted him to replace Sam Altman as the company's chief executive. Then they raised a second proposal: a potential merger between…