FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1983–1997 births
Foundation models & AI builders
Modern researchers and builders scale generative models, agents, safety, infrastructure, and new interfaces.
1983–1997 births
Modern researchers and builders scale generative models, agents, safety, infrastructure, and new interfaces.
- Jay Kreps — Apache Kafka; Confluent; real-time data streaming
- Andy Pavlo — Database systems researcher; CMU; database history; systems education
- Diederik Kingma — Adam optimizer (used in virtually all modern neural network training); VAE (variational autoencoders)
- Jacob Devlin — BERT — bidirectional pretraining that transformed NLP (2018)
- Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook/Meta; social networking; VR/metaverse
- Kaiming He — ResNet (residual networks) — enabled training of 100+ layer networks; Mask R-CNN; MAE
- John Resig — jQuery — simplified DOM manipulation; JavaScript ecosystem
- Sam Altman — OpenAI CEO; GPT series; ChatGPT; Y Combinator president
- Ian Goodfellow — Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs, 2014); adversarial examples
- Chris Wanstrath — Co-founded GitHub
- David Ha — World models; neuroevolution; Google Brain; co-founded Sakana AI
- Rich Harris — Created Svelte — compile-time UI framework; SvelteKit; rethinking reactivity
- Jared Kaplan — Neural scaling laws co-author; Anthropic co-founder; physics-to-ML bridge
- John Jumper — AlphaFold 2 lead — solved protein structure prediction; Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024)
- Neha Narkhede — Apache Kafka co-creator; Confluent co-founder
- Martin Kleppmann — Designing Data-Intensive Applications; distributed systems; CRDTs
- Kyunghyun Cho — GRU; sequence-to-sequence; neural machine translation; NYU
- John Schulman — TRPO and PPO; reinforcement learning from human feedback; OpenAI co-founder; Thinking Machines Lab Chief Scientist
- Alex Krizhevsky — AlexNet — ImageNet breakthrough (2012); launched the deep learning revolution
- Ilya Sutskever — AlexNet; sequence-to-sequence learning; OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist; Safe Superintelligence Inc.
- Andrej Karpathy — Deep learning educator; Tesla Autopilot AI director; minGPT; char-rnn
- Aaron Swartz — RSS; Creative Commons; Reddit co-founder; open access activism
- Ashish Vaswani — Lead author "Attention Is All You Need" — Transformer architecture (2017)
- Niki Parmar — Transformer co-author; image Transformer
- Llion Jones — Transformer co-author; co-founded Sakana AI
- Jakob Uszkoreit — Transformer co-author; co-founded Inceptive (RNA design)
- José Valim — Created Elixir — Erlang VM functional language; Phoenix framework
- Alec Radford — GPT-1; GPT-2; CLIP; DALL-E; Whisper — architected OpenAI's core generative models
- Sergey Levine — End-to-end robot learning; offline RL; visual-motor policies; UC Berkeley
- Matei Zaharia — Apache Spark; Databricks; MLflow; unified analytics engine
- Greg Brockman — OpenAI co-founder and president
- Wojciech Zaremba — OpenAI co-founder; robotics and code generation
- Mira Murati — OpenAI product and research leadership through 2024; founded Thinking Machines Lab and serves as CEO
- Guillermo Rauch — Next.js; Vercel; socket.io; modern web deployment
- Mitchell Hashimoto — HashiCorp — Terraform, Vagrant, Vault; infrastructure as code
- Patrick Collison — Co-founded Stripe
- Arthur Mensch — Co-founded Mistral AI — leading European open-weight LLM lab
- Jordan Walke — Created React.js at Facebook — component-based UI revolution
- Sam McCandlish — Scaling laws paper co-author; Anthropic co-founder
- George Hotz — First iPhone jailbreak; PS3 hack; comma.ai (self-driving); tinygrad
- Joy Buolamwini — Algorithmic bias research; Gender Shades study; Algorithmic Justice League
- Chelsea Finn — Meta-learning; MAML; robot learning; Stanford
- TJ Holowaychuk — Express.js; Koa; Luna; prolific npm package author
- Robin Rombach — Lead architect of Stable Diffusion / latent diffusion models
- Clement Delangue — Co-founded Hugging Face — open-source ML model hub
- Evan You — Created Vue.js; Vite build tool — progressive JavaScript framework
- John Collison — Co-founded Stripe
- Evan Spiegel — Co-founded Snapchat — ephemeral media; AR
- Chris Olah — Neural network interpretability; distill.pub; Anthropic researcher; feature visualization
- Tom Brown — GPT-3 lead author — "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners"
- Rewon Child — Sparse Transformer; scaling up GPT architectures at OpenAI
- Thomas Wolf — Hugging Face co-founder; Transformers library; open-source ML
- Dzmitry Bahdanau — Attention mechanism in neural machine translation; foundational to Transformers
- Dan Abramov — Redux; React core team; "Overreacted" blog; React Hooks design
- Palmer Luckey — Oculus VR — modern VR revival; Anduril Industries (defense AI)
- Tri Dao — FlashAttention — memory-efficient attention; crucial to modern LLM training efficiency
- Aravind Srinivas — Perplexity AI; AI search; OpenAI/DeepMind researcher
- Vitalik Buterin — Ethereum; smart contracts; EVM; proof-of-stake transition
- Aidan Gomez — Transformer co-author; co-founded Cohere — enterprise LLM company
- Jason Wei — Chain-of-thought prompting; instruction tuning; emergent abilities of LLMs
- Alexandr Wang — Founded Scale AI; built data-labeling infrastructure for AI training; became Meta Chief AI Officer in 2025