Time recently published its AI 100. This is a great list, some of the people I knew of, but most not. One hundred people can be a lot to comb through; ideally, Time should have created a widget I could click on to just auto-follow all of them on LinkedIn! While exploring the GenAI jungle, I’ve come across a few people that for me have been particularly well-spoken and have really made me sit up and pay attention to specific parts of AI. Several of these are on the Time AI 100 list, but a few aren’t.
There are some very famous AI luminaries that I’ve purposely skipped, the acclaimed “godfathers of AI” (Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio), Sam Altman from OpenAI, and Clara Shih at Salesforce who are all very much in the public eye. I want to go beyond those that are easy to find and talk about a few others I find important.
Aiden Gomez
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Aidan Gomez was one of the authors of the Transformer paper, where the architecture behind Generative AI was first proposed and published. According to his own words, he was the most junior member of the team. Gomez went on to found Cohere AI, which is now a Salesforce partner. Their goal is to make AI safer and more accessible to more people. I particularly liked Gomez’s interviews in Eye on AI and Machine Learning Street Talk.
Gary Marcus
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Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus has been active in the world of AI for decades and is considered a maverick in the current state of discourse in AI. Looking back there have been two schools of AI, Classical AI (or symbols-based AI) and Machine Learning. Marcus has leveled critiques at the current ML-only approach that is being taken with AI and advocates a mixed approach that includes both schools of thought. To those new to AI, this may not seem controversial, but it is. He was not featured in the Times AI 100 list.
Joy Buolamwini
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While doing a research project Joy Buolamwini kept failing to get a facial recognition AI to recognize her face. This sent her on an exploration that brought to light the prevalence of race bias in AI models. She spoke about this in articles, news reports, and in the 2020 Netflix documentary Coded Bias.
On her journey, she also founded the Algorithmic Justice League whose mission is to raise public awareness about the impacts of AI and build a coalition across impacted communities, researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners to prevent AI harm. She is about to publish her book Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What’s Human in a World of Machines. Sadly, Buolamwini and AJL’s work still remains very relevant.
Jon Krohn
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AI technologist and educator Jon Krohn is the Chief Data Scientist at Nebula.io and the current host of the long-running podcast Super Data Science. His engaging approach to the podcast captures the audience’s attention, making every episode a learning experience. Even if parts of it go over my head, there is always something I can take away. In addition to the podcast, Krohn also has several free training videos on his YouTube channel. He is the second of the people on my list who aren’t on Time’s AI 100 list. He also gets my prize for the smiliest data scientist.
Alondra Nelson
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When the Biden Administration drafted the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, the former head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Alondra Nelson led the effort. She has since left the White House but continues to advocate for effective and equitable AI policy. She’s the Harold F. Linder professor at the Institute for Advanced Study among several other affiliations. She’ll be speaking on a panel in November at the Obama Foundation’s Democracy Forum. I was especially impressed by her interview on The Ezra Klein Show.
Mustafa Suleyman
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Mustafa Suleyman has a vision for every person (who wants it) to have a personal AI assistant. Actually, more than a vision; anyone can try Inflection.ai’s “personal intelligence” (Pi) assistant today at pi.ai. I find it to be the most humanistic AI chatbot I’ve tried and the most likely to not get stuck in a loop of, “I’m sorry, as an AI chatbot I can’t…”. Suleyman is a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 and recently published the book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.
Raluca Ada Popa
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The problem of securing data in AI models is very real. Raluca Ada Popa is an associate professor at UC Berkeley and an entrepreneur in secure computing who is working to solve this ongoing issue.
Her earlier start-up, Prevail, focused on encrypted email and file sharing. Recently, she co-founded the start-up Opaque, which focuses on providing encryption-in-use solutions for data science and AI. This leverages NVidia’s recent release of GPUs that support confidential computing. Given the importance of secure data in enterprise AI, her interview on Jon Krohn’s Super Data Science podcast made me sit up and pay attention. Technologies like this could have a big impact on how and when enterprises implement AI.
Summary
The individuals highlighted in this article offer unique perspectives on the future of AI. Their voices add depth and nuance to the ongoing conversation about the role of AI in shaping our future.
As we continue to explore the possibilities and implications of this transformative technology, it is important to seek out this wide range of perspectives and to engage in thoughtful, informed dialogue about its implications.
Let me know in the comments who you follow for the latest AI innovations!