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- The field of artificial intelligence is booming and attracting billions in investment.
- Researchers, CEOs, and legislators are discussing how AI could transform our lives.
- Here are 17 of the major names in the field — and the opportunities and dangers they see ahead.
Investment in artificial intelligence is rapidly growing and on track to hit $200 billion by 2025. But the dizzying pace of development also means many people wonder what it all means for their lives.
Major business leaders and researchers in the field have weighed in by highlighting both the risks and benefits of the industry's rapid growth. Some say AI will lead to a major leap forward in the quality of human life. Others have signed a letter calling for a pause on development, testified before Congress on the long-term risks of AI, and claimed it could present a more urgent danger to the world than climate change.
In short, AI is a hot, controversial, and murky topic. To help you cut through the frenzy, Business Insider put together a list of what leaders in the field are saying about AI — and its impact on our future.
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Hinton's research has primarily focused on neural networks, systems that learn skills by analyzing data. In 2018, he won the Turing Award, a prestigious computer science prize, along with fellow researchers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
Hinton also worked at Google for over a decade, but quit his role at Google last spring, so he could speak more freely about the rapid development of AI technology, he said. After quitting, he even said that a part of him regrets the role he played in advancing the technology.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Hinton said previously.
Hinton has since become an outspoken advocate for AI safety and has called it a more urgent risk than climate change. He's also signed a statement about pausing AI developments for six months.
Associated Press
Yoshua Bengio also earned the "godfather of AI" nickname after winning the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.
Bengio's research primarily focuses on artificial neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. In 2022, Bengio became the computer scientist with the highest h-index — a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author's scholarly output — in the world, according to his website.
In addition to his academic work, Bengio also co-founded Element AI, a startup that develops AI software solutions for businesses that was acquired by the cloud company ServiceNow in 2020.
Bengio has expressed concern about the rapid development of AI. He was one of 33,000 people who signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development. Hinton, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk also signed the letter.
"Today's systems are not anywhere close to posing an existential risk," he previously said. "But in one, two, five years? There is too much uncertainty."
When that time comes, though, Bengio warns that we should also be wary of humans who have control of the technology.
Some people with "a lot of power" may want to replace humanity with machines, Bengio said at the One Young World Summit in Montreal. "Having systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands and create more instability at a geopolitical level, for example, or terrorism."
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Altman was already a well-known name in Silicon Valley long before, having served as the president of the startup accelerator Y-Combinator
While Altman has advocated for the benefits of AI, calling it the most tremendous "leap forward in quality of life for people" he's also spoken candidly about the risks it poses to humanity. He's testified before Congress to discuss AI regulation.
Altman has also said he loses sleep over the potential dangers of ChatGPT.
Meta Platforms
LeCun is professor at New York University, and also joined Meta in 2013, where he's now the Chief AI Scientist. At Meta, he has pioneered research on training machines to make predictions based on videos of everyday events as a way to enable them with a form of common sense. The idea being that humans learn an incredible amount about the world based on passive observation. He's has also published more than 180 technical papers and book chapters on topics ranging from machine learning to computer vision to neural networks, according to personal website.
LeCun has remained relatively mellow about societal risks of AI in comparison to his fellow godfathers. He's previously said that concerns that the technology could pose a threat to humanity are "preposterously ridiculous". He's also contended that AI, like ChatGPT, that's been trained on large language models still isn't as smart as dogs or cats.
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Li's research focuses on machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and cognitively-inspired AI, according to her biography on Stanford's website.
She may be best known for establishing ImageNet — a large visual database that was designed for research in visual object recognition — and the corresponding ImageNet challenge, in which software programs compete to correctly classify objects. Over the years, she's also been affiliated with major tech companies including Google — where she was a VP and chief scientist for AI and machine learning — and Twitter (now X), where she was on the board of directors from 2020 until Elon Musk's takeover in 2022.
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Russell published Human Compatible in 2019, where he explored questions of how humans and machines could co-exist, as machines become smarter by the day. Russell contended that the answer was in designing machines that were uncertain about human preferences, so they wouldn't pursue their own goals above those of humans.
He's also the author of foundational texts in the field, including the widely used textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach," which he co-wrote with former UC-Berkeley faculty member Peter Norvig.
Russell has spoken openly about what the rapid development of AI systems means for society as a whole. Last June, he also warned that AI tools like ChatGPT were "starting to hit a brick wall" in terms of how much text there was left for them to ingest. He also said that the advancements in AI could spell the end of the traditional classroom.
Peter Norvig
He spent several in the early 2000s directing the company's core search algorithms group and later moved into a role as the director of research where he oversaw teams on machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision.
Norvig has also rotated through several academic institutions over the years as a former faculty member at UC-Berkeley, former professor at the University of Southern California, and now, a fellow at Stanford's center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Norvig told BI by email that "AI research is at a very exciting moment, when we are beginning to see models that can perform well (but not perfectly) on a wide variety of general tasks." At the same time "there is a danger that these powerful AI models can be used maliciously by unscrupulous people to spread disinformation rather than information. An important area of current research is to defend against such attacks," he said.
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Gebru was a research scientist and the technical co-lead of Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence team where she published groundbreaking research on biases in machine learning.
But her research also spun into a larger controversy that she's said ultimately led to her being let go from Google in 2020. Google didn't comment at the time.
Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute in 2021 which bills itself as a "space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech's pervasive influence."
She's also warned that AI gold rush will mean companies may neglect implementing necessary guardrails around the technology. "Unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate," Gebru previously said. "We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive."
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The endeavor lead to the Google Cat Project: A milestone in deep learning research in which a massive neural network was trained to detect YouTube videos of cats.
Ng also served as the chief scientist at Chinese technology company Baidu where drove AI strategy. Over the course of his career, he's authored more than 200 research papers on topics ranging from machine learning to robotics, according to his personal website.
Beyond his own research, Ng has pioneered developments in online education. He co-founded Coursera along with computer scientist Daphne Koller in 2012, and five years later, founded the education technology company DeepLearning.AI, which has created AI programs on Coursera.
"I think AI does have risk. There is bias, fairness, concentration of power, amplifying toxic speech, generating toxic speech, job displacement. There are real risks," he told Bloomberg Technology last May. However, he said he's not convinced that AI will pose some sort of existential risk to humanity — it's more likely to be part of the solution. "If you want humanity to survive and thrive for the next thousand years, I would much rather make AI go faster to help us solve these problems rather than slow AI down," Ng told Bloomberg.
Insitro
Koller told BI by email that insitro is applying AI and machine learning to advance understanding of "human disease biology and identify meaningful therapeutic interventions." And before founding insitro, Koller was the chief computing officer at Calico, Google's life-extension spinoff. Koller is a decorated academic, a MacArthur Fellow, and author of more than 300 publications with an h-index of over 145, according to her biography from the Broad Institute, and co-founder of Coursera.
In Koller's view the biggest risks that AI development pose to society are "the expected reduction in demand for certain job categories; the further fraying of "truth" due to the increasing challenge in being able to distinguish real from fake; and the way in which AI enables people to do bad things."
At the same time, she said the benefits are too many and too large to note. "AI will accelerate science, personalize education, help identify new therapeutic interventions, and many more," Koller wrote by email.
Anthropic
Amodei co-founded Anthropic along with six other OpenAI employees, including her brother Dario Amodei. They left, in part, because Dario — OpenAI's lead safety researcher at the time — was concerned that OpenAI's deal with Microsoft would force it to release products too quickly, and without proper guardrails.
At Anthropic, Amodei is focused on ensuring trust and safety. The
