These are the days of large language models (LLMs). This is the story of two important men in the field of AI and how they started working together.
Geoffrey Hinton, now a Nobel laureate, was teaching in 2007 at University of Toronto. He describes how he first met IIaya Sutskever, formerly working in OpenAI as Chief Scientist. Ilaya had completed his master’s in computer science. In Hinton’s office, on a Sunday, Ilaya knocked at the door. Hinton answered the knock. Ilaya requested for working in Hinton’s lab. This is a common practice amongst the students — they approach the faculty for lab work. Hinton passed on a paper on backpropagation to Ilaya and set another meeting with him a week later. In the next meeting, Ilaya came back and said he did not understand the paper. Hinton was disappointed. In fact, Ilaya had understood it thoroughly but had an issue with not giving the gradient to a sensible function optimizer. He wanted to improve on the paper. Hinton realized Ilaya was special. Ilaya did research under Hinton to get his PhD in 2013.
As we have observed in a previous blog, Alex, Hinton and Sutskever developed AlexNet (a CNN network). AlexNet became a precursor to modern AI models.
In 2013, Hinton, Ilaya began working at Google Brain (after a company they had started was acquired by Google). Hinton continued with Google, while Ilaya joined Greg Brockman and Sam Altman to launch OpenAI in 2015.
We know OpenAI initiated the AI revolution by launching ChatGPT in late 2022. Ilaya was overseeing the research at OpenAI as the Chief Scientist.
Hinton has been awarded Nobel in physics in 2024 for inventions in ML. Ilaya left OpenAI and is now working on SSI.
It was a knock at the door of Hinton on a placid Sunday that changed the world for ever.
Leave a Reply