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THE MACHINE AGE CAST

WHO PUT THESE PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF THE FUTURE?

LEATHER JACKETS. DOOMSDAY QUOTES. FIVE-DAY FIRINGS. PAPER TRAILS.

THE MACHINE AGE ROGUES GALLERY

START WITH THESE PEOPLE

The cast, as characters. Every face opens a full file.

PICK A FILE. THEN ANOTHER. ↓

Brockman life strip: dropout → Stripe CTO; OpenAI co-founder, SAFE HUMAN-LEVEL AI; capped-profit engine bolted beneath; 2023 walkout, 'nothing without its people' — returns; wrestling BIG TECHNICAL PROBLEMS; finale: Brockman and Altman, rocket, mountain lookout — NICE VIEW. NOW TRY THE LANDING.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 01 / START HERESam AltmanFIRED. BACK IN FIVE DAYS.OPEN THE FILE

THE NEXT FILES

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  1. Ellison strip: 1944 Chicago adoptee teaches himself to code; 1977 $2,000 Oracle database; 2024 Musk walks away to build 100,000 H100s; Jan 2025 Stargate $500B; Sept 2025 richest man for a day; finale: Ellison + Buddy by a racing yacht gaze at a valley of data centers. HE BOUGHT THE FUTURE.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 02Elon MuskGROK, FEUDS, SUPERCOMPUTERSOPEN FILE
  2. Su life strip: three MIT EE degrees, TI + 13 IBM years; 2007 Freescale CTO; 2012 crumbling AMD; 2014 COO to CEO in four months; 2022 chair, 2023 MI300 swung at Nvidia; lookout finale with Jensen Huang on a flatbed of MI300 crates over the NVIDIA-green valley — SHE CHASED NVIDIA. NVIDIA RAN FASTER.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 03Jensen HuangLEATHER JACKET, ALL THE CHIPSOPEN FILE
  3. Satirical cartoon: two stern senators confront a worried Zuckerberg beside oversized META camera glasses marked REC on an evidence stand, secretly recording an unsuspecting bystander reading in the background.ZIMBO CARTOONFILE 04Mark ZuckerbergZUCK'S AI TALENT SHOPPING SPREEOPEN FILE
  4. Sunday strip: Jack Clark — 2010 ZDNet reporter at server racks; 2014 Bloomberg neural-net specialist; 2016 OpenAI policy director with Import AI; 2021 co-founds Anthropic; finale: Clark and Dario Amodei at a lookout in a megaphone-topped sedan, gazing at a PUBLIC BENEFIT valley.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 05Dario AmodeiCLAUDE AND THE END TIMESOPEN FILE
  5. Sunday strip: Rotorua kid at a computer; 'artificial general intelligence' amid laughter; 2008 'Machine Super Intelligence' thesis, $10,000 prize; 2010 DeepMind founded; 2014 Google buys it; 2023 Chief AGI Scientist; finale: Legg and Demis Hassabis in a rowboat gaze at giant padlocked machines.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 06Demis HassabisPROTEINS FIRST. AGI NEXT?OPEN FILE
  6. Hinton strip: London 1947 brain-doodler; 1978 Edinburgh PhD, lone neural-net believer through the winter; 2012 AlexNet; 2013 Google buys DNNresearch; 2023 quits to warn of AI; 2024 Nobel. Finale: Hinton + Sutskever on a tandem bike gaze at a valley of towering machines. Kicker: THEN IT KEPT GOING.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 07Ilya SutskeverSUPERINTELLIGENCE, NO DISTRACTIONSOPEN FILE
  7. Six-panel strip: Mira Murati — Vlorë engineer, Tesla Model X, Leap Motion, OpenAI 2018 (DALL·E, ChatGPT, GPT-4), CTO 2022, interim CEO three days — finale THE LOOKOUT: Murati + Issue the cat in a beat-up Model X over ONE GIGAWATT data centers. Kicker: NOW SHE'S COMPETING WITH OPENAI.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 08Mira MuratiONE GIGAWATT FOR A STARTUPOPEN FILE
  8. Karpathy life strip: 2005 Toronto, Hinton's reading group; Stanford PhD, builds CS231n; 2015 founding OpenAI; 2017 Tesla, teaches cars to see; 2023 GPT-4, coins vibe coding; 2024 Eureka Labs. Finale: lookout over a vibe-coder valley. Kicker: HE TAUGHT THE WORLD HOW AI WORKS. NOW NOBODY KNOWS.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 09Andrej KarpathyVIBE CODING GOT ITS NAME HEREOPEN FILE
  9. Yann LeCun and Dario Amodei snarl at each other across a cafe table, both grabbing at a wooden crate labeled SANDBOX as sand flies everywhere.ZIMBO CARTOONFILE 10Yann LeCunLLMS AREN'T THE ENDGAMEOPEN FILE
  10. Yoshua Bengio life strip: 1964 France at a terminal; 1993 Montréal NEURAL NETS beachhead; 2019 Turing Award with Hinton and LeCun; 2023 pivot — THE PIONEER STARTS WORRYING under a giant AI eye; governments come calling; finale: Bengio + LeCun in a hot-air balloon over machines glowing with his face.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 11Geoffrey HintonBUILT IT. WON NOBEL. GOT WORRIED.OPEN FILE
  11. Yoshua Bengio life strip: 1964 France at a terminal; 1993 Montréal NEURAL NETS beachhead; 2019 Turing Award with Hinton and LeCun; 2023 pivot — THE PIONEER STARTS WORRYING under a giant AI eye; governments come calling; finale: Bengio + LeCun in a hot-air balloon over machines glowing with his face.THE SUNDAY STRIPFILE 12Yoshua BengioGODFATHER BUILDS A SAFETY LABOPEN FILE

EMPIRE BUILDERS

THE CAST

CAST BY THE NUMBERS

Patterns in the people shaping the machine age.

1976MEDIAN BIRTH YEAR

THE SCHOOL PIPELINE

  1. Stanford University8
  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology7
  3. University of Oxford7
  4. Princeton University6
  5. University of Cambridge6
ALL CAST NUMBERS →

SCIENTISTS

FOUNDATIONAL FIGURES

DOOM PROPHETS

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