where our pictures come from

Image credits

Photographs of real people are real, openly licensed photographs from Wikimedia Commons, resized for the web. Each one is listed below with its photographer, its licence and a link to the original.

10
photographs
8
kinds of licence
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AI-generated faces

  • Real people, real photos

    Anyone who really lived appears only in a real photograph, openly licensed on Wikimedia Commons and credited here.

  • Never an AI likeness

    We never generate pictures of real people. A made-up face next to a real name would teach the wrong thing.

  • Drawings made for the site

    Charts, robots and doodles are hand-drawn SVG made for AI Pathshala, so they stay sharp at any size and weigh almost nothing.

  • Ada Lovelace

    Published the first algorithm meant for a machine, in 1843.

    Photo
    Alfred Edward Chalon
    Licence
    Public domain
    Source

  • Alan Turing

    Asked “Can machines think?” and proposed the Imitation Game (1950).

    Photo
    Possibly Arthur Reginald Chaffin (1893-1954)
    Licence
    Public domain
    Source

  • Claude Shannon

    Founded information theory and co-organised the 1956 Dartmouth workshop.

    Photo
    Jacobs, Konrad
    Licence
    CC BY-SA 2.0 de
    Source

  • John McCarthy

    Coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955 and created Lisp.

    Photo
    "null0"
    Licence
    CC BY-SA 2.0
    Source

  • Marvin Minsky

    Co-founded MIT's AI lab and co-organised Dartmouth 1956.

    Photo
    The original uploader was Sethwoodworth at English Wikipedia.
    Licence
    CC BY 3.0
    Source

  • Frank Rosenblatt

    Built the perceptron (1958), the ancestor of today's neural networks.

    Photo
    Unknown author
    Licence
    CC BY-SA 4.0
    Source

  • Geoffrey Hinton

    Helped make backpropagation work (1986). Turing Award 2018, Nobel Prize 2024.

    Photo
    Eviatar Bach
    Licence
    CC BY-SA 3.0
    Source

  • Yann LeCun

    Pioneered convolutional networks that read handwritten digits. Turing Award 2018.

    Photo
    Jérémy Barande
    Licence
    CC BY-SA 2.0
    Source

  • Yoshua Bengio

    Pioneered neural language models and deep learning. Turing Award 2018.

    Photo
    Maryse Boyce
    Licence
    CC BY 4.0
    Source

  • Fei-Fei Li

    Created ImageNet, the dataset that sparked the deep learning boom.

    Photo
    ITU Pictures
    Licence
    CC BY 2.0
    Source

Meet them properly

Their stories, what each one changed, and a quiz, are in the lesson on the founders of AI.

Open the lesson →