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: PPO algorithm; TRPO; RLHF: core techniques behind ChatGPT training; OpenAI co-founder
- 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 CTO; led ChatGPT and GPT-4 launches
- 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: data labeling infrastructure for AI training