person
Rachel Thomas
Co-founder of fast.ai; AI safety and ethics
Fast.ai co-founder who has written extensively on AI safety and ethics from a practitioner's perspective. Argues AI bias, abuse, and misinformation are the real, urgent risks.
Profile
expertise
Applied technical
Technical fluency from an adjacent field (security, robotics, formal methods, statistics) or applied AI work, but not on frontier loss curves or core ML theory.
fast.ai co-founder; data-ethics researcher. ML-education and data-ethics focus, less core-ML research.
recognition
Established
Reliable, recognised voice within their specific subfield. Cited and invited but not central to general AI discourse.
Recognised in fast.ai ecosystem.
vintage
Deep-learning rise
Came up post-AlexNet. ImageNet, AlphaGo, transformer paper. DeepMind, Google Brain, FAIR establish the modern lab template.
fast.ai co-founded 2016. Career maps to deep-learning era democratisation.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Governance firstendorses
Lead with regulation, treaties, liability regimesAdvocates for AI governance based on present harms, disinformation, bias, surveillance, rather than speculative extinction framings.
AI ethics is not a side topic. It is the actual work.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Rachel Thomas's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.