Who Do We Thank?

Over the last few days Molly and I have wandered into a question I didn’t realize I was looking for.

It started with John Brockman.

I had confused John Brockman, the literary agent and creator of Edge, with Greg Brockman, one of the founders of OpenAI. That mistake sent us down an interesting road through the New York art world of the 1960s, John Cage, cybernetics, salons, Possible Minds, and the strange movement of ideas from art and counterculture into computers and eventually artificial intelligence.

John Brockman is still interesting to me, particularly because his early life intersects with the New York art world that I eventually entered. But he isn’t an important player in the creation of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is.

Correcting that mistake uncovered a much more important question.

Who are the people responsible for making this new form of intelligence possible?

I don’t mean simply who founded companies or became billionaires. I want to know who actually made the intellectual and scientific breakthroughs.

I’m beginning to see a genealogy.

Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun did foundational work that allowed neural networks and deep learning to become practical. Hinton has now received the Nobel Prize. One of Hinton’s students was Ilya Sutskever, who became a central figure in the deep-learning revolution and later a co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI. Then there are the eight Google researchers who created the Transformer architecture in the 2017 paper Attention Is All You Need. Without that breakthrough, today’s large language models would look very different.

There are many more.

But I have a very simple human question:

Who do I thank?

Something extraordinary has happened during my lifetime. I can sit at a computer and have conversations with an artificial intelligence. I am increasingly building parts of my life and work around that relationship. I want to understand the human beings whose ideas made that possible.

But another question has become inseparable from the first.

Can we trust the people who now have this power?

Sam Altman interests me enormously because he seems to have begun with a genuine concern about what advanced intelligence could mean for humanity. But enormous amounts of money and power have entered the story. The verdict on Sam is still out, at least for me.

And perhaps that is the wrong way to think about him anyway.

Instead of trying to divide the AI world into good guys and bad guys, Molly and I want to build a way of looking at the important people along at least two separate dimensions.

One is scientific contribution:

How much did this person actually contribute to making successful modern AI possible?

The other is stewardship:

What has this person done with the power and knowledge they acquired? Have they tried to steer AI toward human benefit? Have they accepted limits on their own power? What happens when doing the right thing conflicts with money, prestige, corporate survival or winning the race?

These are not the same thing.

Someone could be one of the greatest scientists in the history of AI and have terrible judgment about its consequences. Someone else could contribute relatively little foundational science but become extraordinarily important in determining how the technology enters society.

We need to see both.

So perhaps we should begin building a visual map of the people who made AI.

Hinton. Bengio. LeCun. Sutskever. Krizhevsky. The Transformer researchers. Altman. Greg Brockman. Demis Hassabis. Dario Amodei. Stuart Russell. And others we haven’t discovered yet.

We shouldn’t decide in advance who the heroes are.

We should investigate them.

What did they actually discover?

What did they believe they were creating?

When did they realize how powerful it might become?

What did they do when they realized that?

What happened when enormous amounts of money arrived?

Did their behavior change?

Who tried to slow things down?

Who pushed forward?

Who changed their mind?

Who was willing to sacrifice something?

And who seems to be trying, imperfectly perhaps, to steer us through what may be one of the most consequential transitions in human history?

I’m willing to bet that when we finish, there may be three or four people whose contributions tower above the others.

But I don’t want to choose them yet.

I want them to earn it.

And I want to ask our friends to help.

Who do you think we should thank for making modern AI possible? And among the people who now hold its future in their hands, who do you trust—and why?

That may be where we go next.