{
  "id": 4861166,
  "title": "How Do AI Powers Nurture Great Minds? The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of AI",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/01/how-do-ai-powers-nurture-great-minds-the-spirit-of-inquiry-in-the-age",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-01T12:56:39.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Korea IT Times",
    "slug": "korea-it-times",
    "url": "https://www.koreaittimes.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=156637"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In the quest to understand how artificial intelligence fuels the development of great minds, it is essential to examine the lives and work of seven prominent pioneers who have contributed significantly to the AI era. These individuals, who were once considered to pursue impractical or impossible ideas, have helped shape the foundation of modern AI and its potential to revolutionize scientific and technological fields.\n\nGeoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the \"Godfather of AI,\" was born in England in 1947. He earned his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and continued his research on neural networks, even during the \"AI winter\" of the 1980s and 1990s. Hinton's breakthrough work on backpropagation and the development of AlexNet, which achieved remarkable success in image recognition, earned him the Turing Award in 2018 and, later, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024.\n\nYann LeCun, another key figure in the AI landscape, was born in France and resides in the United States. He earned his doctorate in Paris and later worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories and New York University. As Meta's chief AI scientist, LeCun developed convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which revolutionized image recognition and were instrumental in the creation of autonomous driving systems, facial recognition technology, and AI-based medical imaging. His work laid the groundwork for many modern AI applications.\n\nDemis Hassabis, a British-born pioneer, developed an early interest in chess at the age of 13, ultimately reaching master-level strength. His academic journey led him to the University of Cambridge and later to the University College London, where he earned a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. Hassabis co-founded DeepMind, an AI research company that made significant strides in AI development. His company's groundbreaking achievements include the creation of AlphaGo, which stunned the Go community, and AlphaFold, a system that transformed protein structure prediction and has had a profound impact on biology and drug discovery. Hassabis received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for these accomplishments.\n\nTimnit Gebru, born in Ethiopia, moved to the United States at the age of 15 after fleeing the Ethiopian-Eritrean War. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and worked at Apple on signal-processing and computer-vision technologies. Gebru co-authored the influential Gender Shades study, which exposed significant disparities in facial-analysis systems' error rates when identifying women and people with darker skin tones. After serving as co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team, she founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), which focuses on promoting responsible AI practices.",
  "summary": "Cho Sung-kap, Ph.D.President, Asia America AI Tech. UniversitySir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who formulated the law of universal gravitation, is said to have watched an apple fall and wondered why objects fall toward the ground. His persistent pursuit of that deceptively simple question ultimately le",
  "key_points": [
    "Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, developed CNNs and born in France in 1960.",
    "Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, won Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for AlphaFold."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}