FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1977–1983
Data, mobile & deep learning
Data-intensive systems, smartphones, GPUs, and representation learning create a new computing era.
1977–1983
Data-intensive systems, smartphones, GPUs, and representation learning create a new computing era.
- Salvatore Sanfilippo: Created Redis: in-memory data structure store; foundation of modern caching
- Ian Clarke: Freenet: anonymous peer-to-peer network; decentralized censorship resistance
- David Blei: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA); topic models; variational inference
- Nat Friedman: GitHub CEO; GNOME co-founder; Xamarin
- Russ Salakhutdinov: Deep learning; restricted Boltzmann machines; Apple AI director
- Brendan Gregg: BPF performance tools; DTrace; Systems Performance; Netflix; performance engineering
- Charity Majors: Honeycomb; observability movement; operations engineering
- Chris Lattner: LLVM; Swift; MLIR; Clang; Modular/Mojo language
- Steve Chen: Co-founded YouTube
- Eliezer Yudkowsky: AI alignment theory; MIRI founder; rationalist movement; Sequences
- David Heinemeier Hansson: Ruby on Rails: MVC web framework; Basecamp; "convention over configuration"
- Tom Preston-Werner: Co-founded GitHub; created Jekyll; TOML format
- Jawed Karim: Co-founded YouTube; first YouTube video
- Chris Re: Data-centric AI; weak supervision (Snorkel); FlashAttention; Together AI; foundation model data
- Dan Kaminsky: DNS cache poisoning discovery; Internet security; Black Hat presentations
- Luke Zettlemoyer: Semantic parsing; ELMo co-creator; AI2; University of Washington
- Moxie Marlinspike: Signal protocol; Signal messenger; TextSecure; double ratchet algorithm: end-to-end encryption standard
- Yejin Choi: Common sense AI; MacArthur Fellow; UW NLP; moral reasoning in language models
- Noah Smith: NLP research; AI2; structured prediction; computational social science
- Tomas Mikolov: Word2Vec: word embeddings revolution; FastText; key bridge from NLP to neural methods
- Ryan Dahl: Created Node.js; created Deno: server-side JavaScript revolution
- Brian Chesky: Co-founded Airbnb
- Scott Aaronson: Quantum complexity theory; Quantum Computing Since Democritus; BQP; quantum supremacy verification
- Łukasz Kaiser: Transformer co-author; sequence-to-sequence; Google Brain
- Oriol Vinyals: Sequence-to-sequence learning; pointer networks; AlphaStar (StarCraft II); show-attend-and-tell
- Kelsey Hightower: Kubernetes advocate; "Kubernetes the Hard Way"; developer relations; Google
- H.D. Moore: Metasploit Framework creator; penetration testing; vulnerability research
- Tavis Ormandy: Google Project Zero; vulnerability discovery; security research
- Ryan Carniato: SolidJS: reactive JavaScript framework; fine-grained reactivity
- Dario Amodei: Co-founded Anthropic; Claude; AI safety research; scaling laws; RLHF
- Daniela Amodei: Co-founded Anthropic; president
- Solomon Hykes: Created Docker: containerization revolution
- Daniel Ek: Spotify: streaming; recommendation systems
- Drew Houston: Dropbox: cloud file sync
- Brian Armstrong: Co-founded Coinbase
- Kevin Systrom: Co-founded Instagram
- Richard Socher: Sentiment Treebank; dynamic pooling; Salesforce AI chief scientist; you.com
- Percy Liang: HELM benchmarks; Stanford CRFM; foundation model evaluation; semantic parsing
- Timnit Gebru: AI ethics; dataset bias; co-authored "Stochastic Parrots"; founded DAIR Institute
- Emad Mostaque: Stability AI: Stable Diffusion; open-source generative AI movement