#Key Figure

The sequel to P16 — Sam Altman's return to OpenAI after the November 2023 board crisis and the year that followed. The year of GPT-4o, the for-profit conversion, the $157 billion valuation, the Sutskever departure, the AGI rhetoric escalation, the Apple partnership, and the deeper question of what the year revealed about OpenAI's mission and Altman's position in the AI industry.

The Berkeley computer science professor who wrote the most widely used AI textbook, who was among the first mainstream AI researchers to engage seriously with the alignment problem, and who has developed the most coherent technical and philosophical framework for building AI systems that are genuinely safe. The intellectual architect of the cooperative AI vision.

The Stanford professor who assembled fourteen million labelled images when everyone told her the project was impossible, built the benchmark that made the deep learning revolution possible, went to Google as Chief AI Scientist, returned to academia to lead the movement for human-centered AI, and became one of the most important voices connecting technical capability to human values. The complete portrait of the creator of ImageNet.

The full story of OpenAI — the founding mission, the commercial pivot, the release of ChatGPT, the board crisis of 2023, and what it means that the organisation most explicitly committed to humanity's benefit has become the world's most commercially successful AI company. The most consequential organisation in the history of artificial intelligence, and the complicated man who leads it.

The neuroscience-inspired AI lab founded in London, acquired by Google, responsible for AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and committed to a vision of AI as a tool for scientific discovery. The full story of DeepMind — the research culture, the extraordinary victories, the tensions of operating inside one of the world's most powerful companies, and the vision of one of the most intellectually ambitious people in the history of AI.

The siblings who left OpenAI to found Anthropic, the organisation that has put AI safety at the centre of its commercial strategy. The Constitutional AI approach, the interpretability research, the billion-dollar fundraising, and the genuinely difficult question of whether safety and commercialism can coexist at the frontier of AI.

The co-founder of OpenAI, the architect of GPT, the chief scientist who voted to fire Sam Altman and then reversed course, and the founder of Safe Superintelligence Inc. The most technically gifted and most philosophically serious of the deep learning generation's leaders — and the figure whose trajectory tracks the field's own ambivalence about what it is building.

The researcher who built the Atlas of AI — the most comprehensive account of the material, political, and social dimensions of AI development — and who has been arguing, against a field that preferred not to hear it, that AI is not a neutral technology but a product of specific choices made by specific people with specific interests. The most important critical voice in contemporary AI.

The AI ethics researcher who was fired from Google for co-authoring a paper that criticised large language models — and who turned that firing into the founding of the Distributed AI Research Institute, one of the most important independent AI research organisations in the world. The full story of the event that crystallised the tension between AI safety rhetoric and AI research practice.

The Nobel laureate who spent fifty years building the technology he now warns against — the full story of Hinton's departure from Google, his public warnings about AI risk, and what it means that the person who did more than anyone to make the deep learning revolution possible now believes that revolution may have been a mistake. The most consequential change of mind in the history of AI.

The Meta AI chief scientist who has spent his career doing foundational deep learning work, winning the Turing Award alongside Hinton and Bengio, and is now the most prominent voice disagreeing with the catastrophic AI risk narrative. Why the person who built so much of what AI is has such a different view of where it is going — and why his disagreement deserves as much serious attention as the warnings of those who fear AI most.

The third Godfather of Deep Learning, who spent his career building the mathematical foundations of neural network learning and who has, in the years since the ChatGPT moment, become one of the most active and most credible advocates for AI safety research and AI regulation. Why the person who built so much of what AI is now believes that the field's progress requires governance it has been reluctant to accept.

He built the Perceptron — the first machine that could learn. The press called it a thinking machine. Marvin Minsky called it a dead end. History called Minsky right for fifteen years and then spent the next fifty years proving Rosenblatt correct. The most underrated figure in the history of AI, whose ideas now run the world.

He kept working on neural networks when everyone told him it was a dead end. He developed backpropagation, built the research group that produced AlexNet, and triggered the deep learning revolution. Then he quit Google to warn the world that he was afraid of what he had built. The full story of the most important AI researcher of his generation — and the journey from stubborn optimist to frightened sage.

He invented convolutional neural networks, built the first AI system to process real-world visual data at scale, and became the architect of Meta's AI empire. The most argumentative of the Godfathers of Deep Learning — and why his arguments, however combative the delivery, usually turn out to be right.

The third Godfather of Deep Learning — his foundational contributions to recurrent networks, attention mechanisms, and generative models, his evolution from pure researcher to the field's most prominent voice for AI safety and ethics, and why the man who spent his career building increasingly powerful AI systems has become one of the most persuasive voices for ensuring those systems are safe.

He invented LSTM — the architecture that enabled speech recognition, machine translation, and early language models. He has been arguing, loudly and persistently, that he deserves far more credit for modern AI than he receives. The case for why he might be right — and the complicated personality that has made it harder to make that case effectively.

He organised the Dartmouth Conference, coined the term artificial intelligence, invented LISP, and founded the Stanford AI Laboratory. For half a century he was the field's most important institution-builder and its most stubborn defender of symbolic reasoning. The complicated legacy of the man who gave AI its name and its mission.

His towering influence on early AI, his wildly overconfident predictions that a generation would see machine intelligence, the devastating critique of neural networks that set the field back a decade, and the late-career vision of the Society of Mind that remains one of the most original theories of intelligence ever proposed. The most complex figure in the history of AI.

The Logic Theorist, the General Problem Solver, the cognitive revolution, and a Nobel Prize. The most consequential scientific partnership in the history of AI — two men who were convinced they had found the key to human intelligence, built programs that demonstrated it, and spent the rest of their careers working out what they had actually discovered.

He built the world's first chatbot as a demonstration of how shallow conversation could be — and watched in horror as people fell in love with it. The story of Joseph Weizenbaum: the man who understood, earlier and more clearly than almost anyone, what was dangerous about our relationship with intelligent machines, and who spent the rest of his life trying to make the world hear the warning.

He invented cybernetics, the science of communication and control in machines and animals. He warned the world about automation destroying human labour — in 1950. He predicted the ethical crises of AI before the field had a name. And almost nobody listened. The forgotten genius who saw everything coming.

In 1948 a Bell Labs engineer published a paper that invented information theory and gave the entire digital age its mathematical foundation. He then spent his later years building juggling robots, riding a unicycle through the corridors, and playing chess against early computers. The remarkable, playful, essential life of Claude Shannon.

He broke the Nazi's unbreakable code, designed the architecture of the modern computer, asked whether machines could think, and was then chemically castrated by the government he had saved. The full, extraordinary, heartbreaking life of Alan Turing.

She wrote the world's first computer program in 1843 — for a machine that didn't exist yet. Then history forgot her for a hundred years. The extraordinary life of Ada Lovelace, the woman who saw the future before anyone else.