Key people

The researchers and thinkers who shaped the field.

• Alan Turing

  British mathematician who laid theoretical foundations of computing and asked in 1950 whether machines can think.

• John McCarthy

  Helped organise the Dartmouth workshop, put forward the name "artificial intelligence" and created the Lisp programming language.

• Marvin Minsky

  Co-founded the MIT AI laboratory and wrote influential early work on machine intelligence.

• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon

  Built the Logic Theorist, an early program that proved mathematical theorems, and studied human problem solving.

• Frank Rosenblatt

  Created the perceptron, an early trainable neural network.

• Joseph Weizenbaum

  Created ELIZA and later wrote thoughtfully about the limits and risks of computers in society.

• Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio

  Pioneers of deep learning who shared the 2018 Turing Award.

• Fei-Fei Li

  Led the creation of ImageNet, the large image dataset that helped drive the deep learning breakthrough.

• Demis Hassabis

  Co-founder of DeepMind, whose work includes AlphaGo and AlphaFold.