Introduction
Short profiles of the researchers, engineers, and founders whose work built the field this course teaches.
Every idea in the course and the glossary has a name attached to it — someone who proved a theorem, shipped a paper, or bet a career on an approach everyone else had given up on. This section is short biographical profiles of those people: what they actually did, why it mattered, and where it shows up in the curriculum.
Grouped roughly by era in the sidebar — founding theory, the connectionist revival, the modern deep learningDeep LearningDeep learning is machine learning using multi-layer neural networks, which learn their own features from raw data instead of relying on hand-engineered ones. and transformerTransformerThe transformer is the neural network architecture built around self-attention, introduced in 2017, underlying essentially all modern LLMs. era, and the labs and applied work shaping AIAI (Artificial Intelligence)AI is the field of building systems that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence — reasoning, perception, language, and decision-making. today. Names mentioned in lessons and glossary entries link here automatically, the same way technical terms link to the glossary.
This site is named for one of them — Marvin MinskyMarvin MinskyCo-founder of the MIT AI Lab and a founding figure of the field — his 1969 book with Seymour Papert exposed the perceptron's limits and helped trigger the first AI winter., a founder of the field who spent his career arguing about what intelligence actually is.