From the 'godfathers of AI' to newer people in the field: Here are 17 people you should know

Investment in artificial intelligence is rapidly growing and on track to hit $200 billion by 2025. But the dizzying pace of development also means many people wonder what it all means for their lives. Major business leaders and researchers in the field have weighed in by highlighting both the risks and benefits of the industry's rapid growth. Some say AI will lead to a major leap forward in the quality of human life. Others have signed a letter calling for a pause on development, testified before Congress on the long-term risks of AI, and claimed it could present a more urgent danger to the world than climate change. In short, AI is a hot, controversial, and murky topic. To help you cut through the frenzy, Business Insider put together a list of what leaders in the field are saying about AI -- and its impact on our future.

Geoffrey Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, is known as a "godfather of AI."

Hinton's research has primarily focused on neural networks, systems that learn skills by analyzing data. In 2018, he won the Turing Award, a prestigious computer science prize, along with fellow researchers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.

Hinton also worked at Google for over a decade, but quit his role at Google last spring, so he could speak more freely about the rapid development of AI technology, he said. After quitting, he even said that a part of him regrets the role he played in advancing the technology. "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Hinton said previously. Hinton has since become an outspoken advocate for AI safety and has called it a more urgent risk than climate change. He's also signed a statement about pausing AI developments for six months.

Yoshua Bengio is a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal.

Yoshua Bengio also earned the "godfather of AI" nickname after winning the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

Bengio's research primarily focuses on artificial neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. In 2022, Bengio became the computer scientist with the highest h-index -- a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author's scholarly output -- in the world, according to his website.