LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – Seven foundational figures in the world of Artificial Intelligence were awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize) on Wednesday, November 5, 2025, in a ceremony at St James's Palace. The honour recognises their collective contributions that have propelled the field of modern machine learning, the technological backbone of the current AI revolution that is reshaping industries globally.

The recipients are Professor Fei-Fei Li, often called the ‘godmother of AI’; Professor Yoshua Bengio; Dr. Geoffrey Hinton; Dr. Yann LeCun; Professor John Hopfield; Dr. Bill Dally; and Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia. Prof. Li, the sole woman in the group, told the BBC she was “proud to be different,” embracing her moniker as a way to ensure women scientists are recognised for their contributions.

This global recognition of AI's architects comes at a pivotal moment for Kenya, which is aggressively positioning itself as a leader in AI adoption and governance on the African continent. On March 27, 2025, Kenya's Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy launched its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy for 2025-2030. The strategy aims to create a structured framework for AI innovation, investment, and responsible governance to drive socio-economic development.

The Architects of Modern Intelligence

The seven laureates are credited with developing the three core pillars of modern machine learning: advanced algorithms, high-performance hardware, and high-quality datasets.

Professors Bengio, Hinton, Hopfield, and LeCun laid the conceptual groundwork for artificial neural networks, which mimic the human brain's structure to learn from vast amounts of data. Hinton, often dubbed a "Godfather of AI," was instrumental in developing the backpropagation algorithm in the 1980s, a fundamental technique for training neural networks. Bengio, another Turing Award recipient alongside Hinton and LeCun, is renowned for his pioneering work in deep learning. LeCun is celebrated for creating convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have revolutionised computer vision. Professor Hopfield, a 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, introduced the 'Hopfield network' in 1982, a model that helped revitalise AI research.

The hardware that powers these complex algorithms was pioneered by Jensen Huang and Bill Dally of Nvidia. Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, guided the company's transformation from a graphics chip maker for gaming to the dominant force in AI hardware, with its Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) becoming essential for training large-scale AI models.

Professor Fei-Fei Li's crucial contribution was the creation of ImageNet, a massive, labelled dataset of images. Launched in 2009, ImageNet provided the high-quality data necessary to train and benchmark computer vision models, effectively unlocking the potential of deep learning and catalyzing the modern AI boom. She is currently the Co-Director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute.

Kenya's AI Ambitions and Regional Context

The advancements celebrated by the QEPrize are no longer confined to research labs in North America and Europe. A recent report by global technology firm Zoho revealed that 96% of Kenyan organisations have started integrating AI, the highest adoption rate in Africa. This adoption is primarily focused on practical applications like customer service (54.8%) and software development (51.2%).

Kenya's national strategy explicitly aims to leverage AI for national development in key sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, and finance. The plan acknowledges the need to build a robust ecosystem through investments in digital infrastructure, data governance, and talent development. The government's proactive stance is designed to attract global AI firms and foster homegrown innovation, aligning with broader frameworks like the African Union's Continental AI Strategy.

However, challenges remain. Kenyan firms identify a lack of technical expertise (48.8%) and high costs as significant barriers to deeper AI integration. To counter this, the national strategy emphasizes building local capacity and skills in areas like data analysis and prompt engineering. The country's strong performance in data privacy governance, with 82.1% of organisations strengthening privacy measures post-AI integration, provides a solid foundation for building public trust.

As the world honours the pioneers who laid the groundwork for AI, Kenya's concurrent push to harness this technology underscores a global shift. The nation's youth-driven tech scene and strategic policy-making position it as a key player in shaping the future of AI in East Africa and beyond, transforming a revolutionary technology into a tool for inclusive and sustainable development.