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 — Founded Stability AI; helped fund and distribute Stable Diffusion; resigned as CEO in March 2024