AI ACADEMICS

ACADEMICS

• Andrew NgGoogle Brain, Baidu, Coursera, DeepLearning.AI — one of the people who turned modern AI into a mass profession.
• Anil SethControlled hallucination, predictive processing, biological naturalism — and the argument that silicon may not get consciousness for free.
• Daniel DennettConsciousness, evolution, intentionality: a lifetime spent asking how minds can emerge from machinery.
• David ChalmersThe hard problem of consciousness followed him straight into the LLM era.
• Ethan MollickOne Useful Thing, classroom experiments, and a professor treating every new model like office equipment that needs testing.
• Fei-Fei LiImageNet taught machines to see. Now Fei-Fei Li wants them to understand 3D space.
• Geoffrey HintonBuilt neural networks through the wilderness, won the Nobel, then started warning about what he helped unleash.
• Jerry KaplanEarly commercial AI, a tablet company that lost, internet auctions, labor warnings — and a veteran founder still arguing with doomers.
• John SearleA room that can answer perfect Chinese without understanding a word. Every fluent chatbot walks straight into the argument.
• Nick BostromSuperintelligence took machine doom from thought experiment to respectable academic subject.
• Stuart RussellWrote the standard AI textbook, then spent years arguing the textbook's machines need a better control problem.
• Yann LeCunConvolutional nets, FAIR, NYU — and a long-running insistence that chatbots are not the endgame.
• Yoshua BengioTuring Award, frontier-risk warnings, and a new lab built around making AI safer.
• Yuval Noah HarariSapiens, information networks, and the question of what happens when machines join the storytellers.