Curated playlist
Machine learning researchers
- 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…
- 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…
- 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”…
- Jürgen SchmidhuberJürgen Schmidhuber was born on the 17th of January 1963, and for decades the New York Times ran a profile of him under the headline "When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'." That headline captures something both admiring…
- 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…
- 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…
- Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil was born on the 12th of February 1948 in Queens, New York City, to parents who had fled Austria just before World War II. By the time he was twelve years old, he had already taught himself to work with computers at a moment…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- Karl SteinbuchKarl Steinbuch is remembered in part for a single word. In 1957, together with Helmut Gröttrup, he coined Informatik, the German term for computer science. That word spread from Stuttgart to German-speaking universities across Europe,…
- Seppo LinnainmaaSeppo Ilmari Linnainmaa was born on the 28th of September 1945, in Pori, Finland. He grew up to become a mathematician and computer scientist, and today he is known for creating the modern version of backpropagation. In 1974, he received…