Within Elon Musk's xAI, Ba chips away at the big, nebulous goal to "understand the true nature of the universe." He's a former student of Geoffrey Hinton, popularly known as the Godfather of AI. Ba, part of Business Insider's 2024 AI Power List, has a background in deep neural networks, a type of artificial-intelligence model consisting of a layered network of artificial neurons that mimic pathways in the human brain. At the University of Toronto he is an assistant professor at the university's machine-learning group. He was also a research fellow at Meta, where he focused on understanding how "attention-based" neural networks behaved. "The technology available needs to consider the complexity of ethics, privacy, fairness, and good versus evil," Ba said in a 2020 TEDx Talk. "One day there will be humanlike learning machines capable of understanding our cultural norms and the nuances in our human values. It will transform our daily lives and our society profoundly."
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