While 2024 has been a year of progress, it has also been a hotbed of bold claims and heated controversies within the world of AI. This article looks back at the most controversial figures in AI in 2024 – individuals who stirred debates, challenged norms and redefined what AI can and should do.
Jürgen Schmidhuber
German computer scientist Jürgen Schmidhuber, known for his work on recurrent neural networks, has often argued that he and other researchers have not received adequate recognition for their contributions to deep learning. Instead, he claimed, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio have received disproportionate credit.
Most recently, he alleged that Hinton’s Nobel Prize is based on uncredited work. Schmidhuber alleged that Hinton and Hopfield’s contributions were heavily influenced by existing research without inadequate acknowledgement.
“This is a Nobel Prize for plagiarism,” Schmidhuber wrote on LinkedIn. He argued that methodologies developed by Alexey Ivakhnenko and Shun’ichi Amari in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, formed the foundation of the laureates’ work.
“They republished methodologies developed in Ukraine and Japan without citing the original papers. Even in later surveys, they didn’t credit the original inventors,” Schmidhuber said, suggesting that the omission may have been intentional.
Rosalind Picard
Rosalind Picard, a professor at MIT Media Lab, recently faced controversy over alleged discriminatory remarks made during a keynote speech at NeurIPS 2024 towards Chinese students.
During her presentation, Picard mentioned an incident involving a Chinese student who had been expelled. The act drew criticism for appearing to single out nationality and reinforce harmful stereotypes. This prompted apologies from both Picard and the NeurIPS organisers and sparked discussions about inclusivity and respect within the AI research community.
Bhavish Aggarwal
Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola’s AI chatbot Krutrim, made several notable statements about AI this year that sparked discussions.
Earlier this year, Aggarwal framed India’s AI development in terms of data sovereignty and criticised what he termed “techno-colonialism” to describe the exploitation of developing countries by global tech giants through technology.
“India generates the largest amount of digital data in the world, but all of it is sitting in the West…They take our data out, process it into AI and then bring it back and sell it in dollars to us. It’s the same East India Company all over again,” he said.
His remarks triggered controversy, as critics noted that much of Ola’s early funding had come from global investment firms.
Meanwhile, following an incident where LinkedIn’s AI tool referred to him using gender-neutral pronouns, Aggarwal announced that Ola would shift from Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to its own Krutrim cloud. Moreover, he called on other Indian companies to follow suit, which some interpreted as promoting anti-Western sentiment in the tech industry.
Eric Schmidt
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently made several notable statements about AI and its potential risks. In interviews with ABC News and PBS, Schmidt warned that AI systems could reach a “dangerous point” when they can self-improve, suggesting that we need to consider “unplugging” them at that stage.
He expressed concern about computers running autonomously and making their own decisions, calling for human oversight to maintain “meaningful control” over autonomous weapons.
Mira Murati
Mira Murati, former chief technology officer of OpenAI, found herself at the centre of controversy in March regarding the training data for Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video AI model.
During an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Murati was asked about the specific sources of data used to train Sora. She revealed that the model was trained on “publicly available and licensed data”. However, when asked whether content from platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook was used to train the model, she responded with uncertainty, saying, “I’m actually not sure about that. I’m not confident about it.”
Hoan Ton-That
This year, Hoan Ton-That, CEO and co-founder of Clearview AI, remained a controversial figure in the AI industry due to his company’s facial recognition technology and its practices.
Clearview AI faced significant legal issues, including a €30.5 million fine from the Dutch Data Protection Authority for maintaining an “illegal database” of billions of facial images. The company was also warned of additional penalties of up to €5.1 million for failing to comply with EU data protection laws.
Despite these challenges, Ton-That defended the company as he asserted that it only uses publicly available online data and compared its approach to Google’s photo search. He argued that Clearview’s technology plays a crucial role in law enforcement, citing its use in investigations into the January 6 Capitol riots.
Scarlett Johansson
Earlier this year,Scarlett Johansson became embroiled in a major controversy regarding the alleged unauthorised use of her voice by OpenAI in ChatGPT. The issue surfaced when OpenAI unveiled a new voice feature called ‘Sky’, which many users noticed sounded strikingly similar to Johansson’s voice from her role in the movie ‘Her’.
The situation escalated when Johansson publicly expressed her frustration after discovering that OpenAI had created a voice for the chatbot that she felt resembled hers too closely. This came despite her having declined an offer from OpenAI in September 2022 to lend her voice to the project. Upon hearing a demo of the new voice, Johansson was reportedly shocked and upset, leading her to demand that OpenAI halt the use of the voice.
Prabhakar Raghavan
Earlier this year, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s chief technologist, faced criticism over the company’s Gemini AI image generation feature. The controversy stemmed from Gemini producing historically inaccurate and overly diverse images in response to prompts about specific historical figures and events.
For example, when prompted to create depictions of the Founding Fathers of the United States, the AI-generated images included individuals from various ethnic backgrounds, which did not align with historical records.
Raghavan admitted that the feature had fallen short and issued an apology for the inaccuracies. He explained that the AI model had been adjusted to promote diversity in its outputs, which occasionally resulted in overcorrection.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk has a love-hate relationship with OpenAI. The tech billionaire recently filed a preliminary injunction to stop OpenAI from switching to a for-profit model. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, accused the company of antitrust violations and betraying its founding principles. His lawsuit, which now includes Microsoft as a defendant, argues that OpenAI has moved away from its original nonprofit mission to use AI research to benefit humanity. In response, OpenAI released emails and documents from 2017 showing that Musk had supported a for-profit structure and even sought majority control of the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly called Musk “a clear bully”.
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