Ian Goodfellow

Ian J. Goodfellow (born 1987[1]) is an American computer scientist, engineer, and executive, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He was a research scientist at Google DeepMind,[2] was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain, and director of machine learning at Apple, as well as one of the first employees at OpenAI. He has made several important contributions to the field of deep learning, including the invention of the generative adversarial network (GAN). Goodfellow co-wrote, as the first author, the textbook Deep Learning (2016)[3] and wrote the chapter on deep learning in the authoritative textbook of the field of artificial intelligence, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach[4][5] (used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries).[6] Goodfellow obtained his BSc and MSc in computer science from Stanford University under the supervision of Andrew Ng,[7] and his PhD in machine learning from the Université de Montréal in February 2015, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville.[8][9] Goodfellow's thesis is titled Deep learning of representations and its application to computer vision.[8][10] After graduation, Goodfellow joined Google as part of the Google Brain research team.[11] In March 2016, he left Google to join the newly founded OpenAI research laboratory.[12] 11 months later, in March 2017, Goodfellow returned to Google Research,[13] but left again in 2019.[14] In 2019, Goodfellow joined Apple as director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group.[14] He resigned from Apple in April 2022 to protest Apple's plan to require in-person work for its employees.[15][16][17] Shortly after, Goodfellow then joined Google DeepMind as a research scientist.[2][18][19] In 2025, Goodfellow left Google.[citation needed]