Kenneth O. Stanley

Author and Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences

Kenneth O. Stanley is the Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences. He previously led a research team at OpenAI also on the challenge of open-endedness. Before that, he was Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and was also a co-founder of Geometric Intelligence Inc., which was acquired by Uber to create Uber AI Labs, where he was head of Core AI research. He is an inventor of popular algorithms including NEAT, novelty search, and CPPNs. He has won more than 10 best paper awards and his original 2002 paper on NEAT also received the 2017 ISAL Award for Outstanding Paper of the Decade 2002 - 2012 from the International Society for Artificial Life.  He is also a coauthor of the popular science book, "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective," and has spoken widely on its subject.

It was Stanley’s book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, that first caught our attention. In it, he challenges one of the most entrenched assumptions of modern life: that ambitious goals and relentless optimization are the path to greatness. Coming from someone who led a research team at OpenAI—arguably the very heart of the modern objective-driven race—his message couldn’t be more poignant. Stanley invites us to consider discovery without a destination, innovation without a checklist. That idea resonates deeply with the ethos of Worthshop Ground: stepping out of the cycle of over-optimization and returning to the raw, generative spark beneath it all. His voice reminds us that creativity is not a straight line—and that some of the most meaningful breakthroughs happen when we stop trying so hard to make them.

L I N K S:

kenstanley.net

Book: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Lila Sciences