D. Scott Phoenix is an American entrepreneur and former cofounder and CEO of Vicarious, an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

research company funded by 250M from

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The Bori ...

Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...

, and others that was acquired by Intrinsic, an Alphabet company in 2022.

Career

In 2007, Phoenix graduated from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Science and Entrepreneurship. After graduation, Phoenix started a company through the Y Combinator program, and later joined venture capital firm Founders Fund as Entrepreneur in Residence. In 2010, Phoenix co-founded Vicarious with neuroscientist and AI researcher

Dileep George Dileep George is an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher. Career George received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2006 and was a visiting fellow at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience a ...

. He is an advocate for the development of safe AI, and a leading signatory on the

Future of Life Institute The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization that works to reduce global catastrophic and existential risks facing humanity, particularly existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence (AI). The Institute's work is mad ...

Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence In January 2015, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and dozens of artificial intelligence experts signed an open letter on artificial intelligence calling for research on the societal impacts of AI. The letter affirmed that society can reap great potent ...

and the Asilomar AI Principles. In 2016, he predicted that by 2031 the fastest computing system would perform more operations per second than the number of neocortical neurons in all human brains alive at the time of the quote (on the order of 10^20 FLOPS, or 100 exaflops). After Vicarious was acquired, Phoenix spent a year as the Chief Product and Revenue Officer of Intrinsic, an Alphabet subsidiary. Phoenix is interviewed in the 2018 AI documentary

Do You Trust This Computer? ''Do You Trust This Computer?'' is a 2018 American documentary film directed by Chris Paine that outlines the benefits and especially the dangers of artificial intelligence. It features interviews with a range of prominent individuals relevant to ...

, on

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

In Principle, and the 2020 AI documentary ''MACHINE''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Phoenix, D Scott University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni American company founders 1982 births Living people