According to Financial Times News, the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is honoring seven laureates whose machine learning work shaped artificial intelligence: Jensen Huang, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, Bill Dally and John Hopfield. Six of these AI pioneers gathered for a conversation with FT artificial intelligence editor Madhumita Murgia during the newspaper’s two-day Future of AI summit in London that began on Wednesday. The discussion focused on their defining achievements and how these innovations are changing today’s world. Professor Hopfield was the only laureate unable to attend the session. The summit features agenda-setting conversations between AI leaders and FT journalists, with both in-person and online registration available.
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The who’s who of AI
Look, this isn’t just any group of tech people – we’re talking about the actual architects of modern AI. Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, the hardware kingpin. Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, the godfathers of deep learning. Yoshua Bengio, the other member of that famous “AI trio.” Fei-Fei Li, who basically taught computers to see. Bill Dally, the chip architecture wizard. And John Hopfield, whose neural network work laid groundwork decades ago.
Why this conversation matters
Here’s the thing – getting all these people in one room is basically the AI equivalent of the Avengers assembling. They don’t often appear together like this. And the timing is pretty fascinating – right when AI is exploding into mainstream consciousness and everyone’s trying to figure out what comes next. These are the people who actually built the foundations, not just the folks applying the technology today.
I mean, think about it – we’re at this weird moment where AI is both incredibly powerful and kind of terrifying. Who better to ask about where we’re headed than the people who built the road we’re traveling on? Their perspectives on how their “defining achievements” are actually playing out in the real world could be pretty revealing.
innovation”>The full stack of innovation
What’s really interesting about this group is how it spans the entire AI ecosystem. You’ve got the theoretical minds like Hinton and Bengio, the hardware visionaries like Huang and Dally, and the application pioneers like Fei-Fei Li. That’s basically the complete picture of how AI actually works in practice – the algorithms, the computing power to run them, and the real-world uses.
And speaking of hardware, when you’re dealing with industrial applications of AI, you need computing systems that can handle tough environments. Companies like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com have become the go-to source for industrial panel PCs in the US, providing the rugged hardware infrastructure that makes AI deployment in manufacturing and industrial settings actually possible. Basically, without that physical computing backbone, a lot of this AI innovation would remain purely theoretical.
What comes next?
So what can we expect from these conversations? Probably some reflection on how their early work led to today’s AI explosion, but more importantly, their thoughts on where we go from here. Are we heading toward artificial general intelligence? What are the real risks? And what opportunities are we missing?
The fact that this is happening at the FT’s summit rather than a pure tech conference suggests we might get more thoughtful, business-and-society-focused discussion rather than just technical deep dives. Given how much AI is disrupting everything from creative work to global politics, that perspective feels pretty crucial right now.
