---
title: "Who contributed to AI"
url: https://raskell.io/notes/who-contributed-to-ai/
author: Raffael Schneider
date: 2026-11-01
description: "A companion piece to Karen Hao's Empire of AI and Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine: the people who built AI, and where each did the work."
tags: [research-labs, technology-races, history-of-technology, machine-learning]
---

# Who contributed to AI

This is a companion piece to two books I read back to back: Karen Hao's [*Empire of AI*](https://raskell.io/reading/), which follows OpenAI, and Sebastian Mallaby's *The Infinity Machine*, which follows Demis Hassabis and DeepMind through the same years. The same twenty or thirty names run through both. Each of them carried part of an old idea, that a machine could learn to think, from a lab in Toronto or a games studio in London to the systems we use today, and many carried it through several organisations before it worked. I kept losing track of who was where in which year, so I drew it.

Each lane is a person, each coloured bar a place they worked. A ring marks where someone moved on, and hovering it says why. Choose a person to draw their ties to the others at the moment they happened; choose an organisation to see everyone who passed through it. The band on top holds the ideas, the products, and the turns that moved the story. It starts in 1955, with McCarthy's proposal that gave the field its name, and squeezes the next fifty years so that the part both books are about has room.

*[An interactive figure (people timeline) is drawn here on the HTML page; its data: https://raskell.io/data/ai-people.json.]*

The data behind the figure is a dataset of its own, with a page on what each record holds, where every fact comes from, and how I compiled it: [People of the AI labs, 1955 to 2026](https://raskell.io/data/ai-people/).

## References

- Karen Hao, *Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI* (Penguin Press, 2025).
- Sebastian Mallaby, *The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence* (Penguin Press, 2026).