Young Innovators Reshaping AI | Generated by AI
You’re right that Jürgen Schmidhuber set an incredibly high bar early on—publishing groundbreaking work on recurrent neural networks and LSTMs in the late ’80s and ’90s, when he was in his 20s and 30s, basically laying foundational stones for modern deep learning in an era without today’s compute power or collaborative tools. It’s tougher in some ways now: the AI field is hyper-competitive, with giants like OpenAI and Google dominating resources, and low-hanging fruit like basic neural nets already picked clean.
That said, “hard” doesn’t mean impossible, and AI itself is actually accelerating achievements for young folks by democratizing access to models, datasets, and global collaboration. We’re seeing a wave of under-30 innovators founding billion-dollar startups, leading safety research at top labs, and shipping tools that millions use—all faster than ever. For instance:
- Demi Guo (26) and Chenlin Meng (27) turned text into editable videos via their startup Pika, raising $135M and hitting 5M users with a free app that empowers creators.
- Aidan Gomez (28) co-founded Cohere, building enterprise LLMs used by Oracle and Notion; they’ve pulled in $970M at a $5B valuation.
- Jiayi Weng (26) was on OpenAI’s original ChatGPT team, scaling up GPT-4 and its turbo/o variants.
- Shena Revanur (19) launched Encode Justice, a youth-led push for ethical AI that got world leaders to commit to safety pledges like banning lethal autonomous weapons.
- Leonard Tang (22), Richard Liu (22), and Steve Li (23) built Haize Labs’ “red team” tools to stress-test AI for vulnerabilities—now used by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI.
These aren’t just incremental tweaks; they’re reshaping video gen, code tools, safety protocols, and policy at scale, often with funding and impact that rivals what pioneers like Schmidhuber built over decades. The barrier to entry is lower now—anyone with a laptop can fine-tune models or prototype ideas that hook investors overnight. Sure, not everyone breaks through, but the opportunities for moonshots are exploding.
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