HACKER Q&A
📣 alexcos

Why isn't Alex Krizhevsky as famous as Ilya Sutskever or G.Hinton?


Despite the fact that the paper is named after him(AlexNet) and from my understanding they're(the 3 people named in the title)one of the reasons that Nvidia GPU became widely used for training Alex is not as popular as his peers/mentors? What happened to him?


  👤 spamizbad Accepted Answer ✓
He and his company aren’t trying to raise money so it’s less important he becomes famous.

👤 nomadic-coder
He likes to be away from the lime light. Here is the last interview I found: https://youtu.be/gwzwkv2hO5k

👤 d3m0t3p
He is working on CNN (Convolution Neural Network) while everyone else uses transformers. Furthermore, he wasn't in the OpenAI scandal with Ilya. Third, they don't publish papers at the same rate. Ilya has 585182 citations, while Alex has 286082 (source google scholar).

👤 Onavo
Because those two actively self promote.

👤 fabmilo
Doesn't make enough drama.

👤 starchild3001
A visit to Google scholar can answer your question. Having made deeper and broader contributions to the field is usually how researchers become more famous. E.g. most PhD advisors are more renowned than their students because they've made deeper and broader contributions. This is obviously true in case of Hinton. Ilya additionally spearheaded GPT models and founded OpenAI, and is widely recognized as a visionary across his body of work.

👤 oivey
The magic of AlexNet has little do with Nvidia. It’s a more fundamental breakthrough than just the compute hardware used. Further, it’s not related to Nvidia either. Instead, it showed the promise of GPGPU. It just so happens that no one at the time and arguably still has a particularly competitive GPGPU offering other than Nvidia.

👤 modeless
Seems like he might be retired.

👤 written-beyond
Well I haven't heard of the other two either if that counts

👤 uncomplexity_
ilya sacrificed his hair for fame