The people shaping AI, and where each of them stands.
Sourced profiles of the researchers and founders whose work and arguments set the direction of the field. See what they built, what they believe, how their views have changed, and who disagrees with them. The collection has 15 full profiles.
In their words
15 sourced quotes from the people shaping AI.
"I'm very confident that, if the only recipe is scaling up existing transformer networks, I don't think that will get us there. We still need additional technical breakthroughs."
"I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be."
"In key domains such as mathematics, coding, and science, the knowledge extracted from human data is rapidly approaching a limit."
"There are some root node problems that, if you solve them, you unlock entire new branches of research."
"'Artificial intelligence' is an inherently anthropomorphizing term. It sells the tech as more than it is"
"Yet they remain wordsmiths in the dark; eloquent but inexperienced, knowledgeable but ungrounded."
"To paraphrase an old parable, Hinton has built a better ladder; but a better ladder doesn't necessarily get you to the moon."
"I like to think of it as: imagine yourself and a three-year-old. We'll be the three-year-olds."
"Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?"
"It is our job to create computing technologies that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human: everybody in the world is now a programmer."
"If we can't read or understand it, we've started to lose control."
"We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it's much less weird than it seems like it should be."
"When a bridge collapses, you don't analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who is the person who built this bridge to be so flimsy?"
"People have had this illusion, or delusion, that it is a matter of time until we can scale them up to having human-level intelligence, and that is simply false."
"It is painful to face the idea that we may have been contributing to something that could be greatly destructive."
Forty years, one network
Watch the field assemble itself, era by era. The network follows 57 people and 19 organizations. See the labs, the people inside them, the moves between them and the milestones that changed what AI could do.
Beyond the profiles
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The labs →
9 frontier labs: their history, what they built and where their people went.
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More people →
42 brief profiles of the researchers and executives inside the labs.
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Predictions →
47 dated forecasts, each checked against what happened.
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Milestones →
28 papers, models and laws that moved the arguments.
Where does every fact come from?
Each profile lists the papers, talks, testimony and reporting it draws on. The 15 profiles list 591 source entries. Quotes are verbatim, dated and linked.
How have their positions moved?
The 15 profiles record 121 stances on risk, regulation, open models and timelines. Each has a quote and a note on what has changed since.
The other side, argued properly
Every profile carries the strongest case against its subject. It names who makes it and says where the argument stands. The 15 profiles contain 70 debate entries.