Gratitude
Pioneers of the AI movement
The people whose work everything we teach stands on — from backpropagation to agents in the terminal. We are grateful to them, and we look up to them.
- people
- 66
- groups
- 5
- milestone years
- 1986 — 2025
Going first doesn't mean going alone
Why we say thanks
Every lesson in the school rests on someone's paper, library or open repository. Naming the authors and linking their work is the least we can do.
What going first means
Agentic development is new ground: few textbooks, rules being written now. Going first means trying things early, reporting honestly what worked, and sharing in the open. That is what the people on this page did.
Who we look up to
Not loud announcements but habits: publish the code, explain simply, test in practice. Those are the habits we try to bring into learning.
Who we look up to66
Hover a card to see what we thank them for. Click to open the profile: achievements with sources, repositories, links.
Pioneer of the week
Paul Gauthier
Creator of aider; co-founder and former CTO of Inktomi
Created aider (2023), an open-source AI pair-programming tool that runs in the terminal and edits code in a local git repository; he also maintains its public leaderboards comparing models on code editing.
aiderEvery week our Telegram channel features one person and their work. The card comes from the brand template; posts are published by hand.
Post caption (RU)
По данным aider.chat на 5 октября 2026 года, 88% кода последнего релиза aider написал сам aider. Автор aider — Пол Готье. В 1996 году он вместе с Эриком Брюэром основал поисковую компанию Inktomi. В 2023-м Пол создал aider — открытый инструмент для парного программирования с ИИ в терминале. Он правит код прямо в твоём локальном git-репозитории. Ещё Пол ведёт публичные лидерборды aider по редактированию кода. По ним сравнивают модели для программирования. Код: https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider Профиль и достижения: https://mihalkevich.com/ru/pioneers#p-paul-gauthier
How we got here
Year, event and the people behind it. Every milestone links its primary source.
- 1986
- 1988
- 1997
- 1998
- 2003
- 2009
- 2012
- 2014
- 2016
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
- 2023
- LLaMA — model weights for researchersPrimary source
- llama.cpp — an LLM on a regular laptopPrimary source
- AutoGPT and BabyAGI — autonomous agents for everyonePrimary source
- QLoRA — fine-tuning on a single GPUPrimary source
- “LLM Powered Autonomous Agents”Primary source
- Ollama — a local model in one commandPrimary source
- vLLM and PagedAttentionPrimary source
- 2024
- 2025
Please note
The people on this page are not affiliated with the school, took no part in creating it and have not endorsed it. We are grateful for their open work and link to it — nothing more. Spotted an error, or want to be removed? Write to a.hypesquad@gmail.com.
Photos and attribution (53)
Photos come from Wikimedia Commons (author and license listed) or are people's own GitHub avatars. Where no suitable photo exists, we show a monogram.
- Geoffrey Hinton — Cmichel67, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Yann LeCun — Ecole polytechnique from Paris, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)
- Yoshua Bengio — Xuthoria, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Jürgen Schmidhuber — ITU/R.Farrell, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Sepp Hochreiter — C.Stadler/Bwag, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Fei-Fei Li — ITU Pictures, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Demis Hassabis — John Sears, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Richard Sutton — Xuthoria, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Ilya Sutskever — Eladkarmel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Ian Goodfellow — GitHub avatar @goodfeli
- Dzmitry Bahdanau — GitHub avatar @rizar
- Noam Shazeer — GitHub avatar @noamshazeer
- Niki Parmar — GitHub avatar @nikiparmar
- Llion Jones — Syced, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped)
- Aidan Gomez — Gabriel Hutchinson, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Łukasz Kaiser — GitHub avatar @lukaszkaiser
- Illia Polosukhin — GitHub avatar @ilblackdragon
- Alec Radford — GitHub avatar @Newmu
- Dario Amodei — TechCrunch, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Jared Kaplan — TechCrunch, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Arthur Mensch — GitHub avatar @arthurmensch
- Jacob Devlin — GitHub avatar @jacobdevlin-google
- Georgi Gerganov — GitHub avatar @ggerganov
- Clément Delangue — SiliconANGLE theCUBE, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- Julien Chaumond — GitHub avatar @julien-c
- Thomas Wolf — Slush, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 (cropped)
- Soumith Chintala — GitHub avatar @soumith
- François Chollet — Ramosset, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
- Woosuk Kwon — GitHub avatar @WoosukKwon
- Tri Dao — GitHub avatar @tridao
- Jeffrey Morgan — GitHub avatar @jmorganca
- Tim Dettmers — GitHub avatar @TimDettmers
- Edward J. Hu — GitHub avatar @edwardjhu
- Lianmin Zheng — GitHub avatar @merrymercy
- Stella Biderman — GitHub avatar @StellaAthena
- Harrison Chase — GitHub avatar @hwchase17
- Jerry Liu — GitHub avatar @jerryjliu
- Shunyu Yao — GitHub avatar @ysymyth
- Toran Bruce Richards — GitHub avatar @Torantulino
- João Moura — GitHub avatar @joaomdmoura
- Omar Khattab — GitHub avatar @okhat
- Paul Gauthier — GitHub avatar @paul-gauthier
- Boris Cherny — GitHub avatar @bcherny
- Fouad Matin — GitHub avatar @fouad
- Andrej Karpathy — GitHub avatar @karpathy
- Andrew Ng — GitHub avatar @andrewyng
- Jeremy Howard — Hr0207, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped)
- Rachel Thomas — GitHub avatar @racheltho
- Jay Alammar — GitHub avatar @jalammar
- Sebastian Raschka — GitHub avatar @rasbt
- Chip Huyen — GitHub avatar @chiphuyen
- Simon Willison — Paul Downey from Berkhamsted, UK, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
- Shawn "swyx" Wang — GitHub avatar @swyxio