PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

David Hendon

David Hendon is a product manager and AI researcher whose work connects consumer software with multimodal foundation models for video. In March 2017, they served as Product Manager for Ms. PAC-Maps, a Google Maps game that turns city streets into a maze for collecting PAC-Dots. They contributed to Google Research's VideoPoet in December 2023 and coauthored its decoder-only transformer paper, which received a Best Paper award at ICML 2024. Their 2024 work also included product management for the VideoPrism visual encoder in February 2024 and a bioRxiv preprint on video foundation models for animal behavior analysis.

Timeline

  1. 2017

    Product Manager for Ms. PAC-Maps

    In March 2017, they serve as Product Manager for Ms. PAC-Maps, a Google Maps game that turns city streets into a maze for collecting PAC-Dots.

  2. December 2023

    Contributing to VideoPoet

    Google Research introduces VideoPoet in December 2023, a large language model for zero-shot video generation across text-to-video, image-to-video, stylization and video-to-audio tasks, with Hendon among its named contributors.

  3. December 2023

    The VideoPoet transformer paper

    Hendon coauthors the December 2023 VideoPoet paper on arXiv, which uses a decoder-only transformer architecture to process image, video, text and audio inputs.

  4. February 2024

    Product management for VideoPrism

    They support product management for VideoPrism, a foundational visual encoder for general-purpose video understanding introduced by Google Research in February 2024.

  5. 2024

    ICML Best Paper for VideoPoet

    VideoPoet receives a Best Paper award at ICML 2024, with Hendon among the coauthors of the poster paper.

  6. 2024

    Video models for animal behavior

    With Jennifer J. Sun, Hao Zhou, Long Zhao, Florian Schroff, David A. Ross and Hartwig Adam, they coauthor a 2024 bioRxiv preprint on video foundation models for animal behavior analysis.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIWe estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  3. 43% of living people shaping AI work outside their country of birthWe estimate that 43% of living people shaping AI work outside their country of birth (520 of 1,198 people with known birth and employment countries).
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionWe estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of David Hendon yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Introducing Ms. PAC-Maps blog.google. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. VideoPoet: A large language model for zero-shot video generation research.google. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. [2312.14125] VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. VideoPrism: A foundational visual encoder for video understanding research.google. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Animal behavioral analysis and neural encoding with transformer-based self-supervised pretraining - PMC pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Video Foundation Models for Animal Behavior Analysis sinoxiv.napstic.cn. Checked 22 October 2026.