Who are the big 4 of AI?

The term "Big 4 of AI" typically refers to the four intellectual pioneers credited with creating the technical foundation of modern deep learning: Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Andrew Ng. Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio were jointly awarded the prestigious ACM Turing Award for their breakthrough conceptual work on artificial neural networks, backpropagation, and convolutional architectures. Andrew Ng played a crucial role in scaling deep learning using GPUs at Stanford, founding the Google Brain project, and educating millions of global practitioners. In an industrial or corporate context, the phrase is occasionally used to denote the four leading enterprise drivers of AI technology: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta, and OpenAI.